U.S. launches direct negotiations
The U.S. launches direct peace talks between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today at the State Department. Netanyahu called Abbas his "partner in peace" on Wednesday and said that he came to Washington to find an "historic compromise" -- adding though that any deal would have to ensure Israel's security. Abbas vowed to push hard despite "the difficulties we're going to face." President Obama noted that he recognized how difficult the task that lies ahead will be. "We are under no illusions," he said. "Passions run deep. Each side has legitimate and enduring interests. Years of mistrust will not disappear overnight..."

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The Knesset, the Israeli parliament, is on summer recess. It went out with a bang -- the withdrawal of several privileges from Balad MK Hanin Zoabi, in retribution for her participation in the Gaza aid flotilla in May. The parliament is due to return to a stormier session still on October 3^rd, with the deadline for the settlement construction freeze expiring just a week earlier and the two-state solution being put to what many believe may be its final test. The fate of the two-state process will likely be reflected in relations between Arabs and Jews in parliament -- from suspicions of double loyalty to the beginnings on an unlikely agreement.

"I don't care about the death threats to me that much," says Zoabi, "My assistant deals with those. The real danger is the de-legitimizing of the political views my party represents." 

Balad actually managed to not lose a seat in the last elections, but Arab citizens of Israel are barely represented in Knesset. Non -Zionist parties take up 11 seats out of the Knesset's 120; less then 10 percent of the parliament, as opposed to their electorate's 20 percent of the population. The secular-nationalist Balad holds three seats; Raam-Taal, a nationalist alliance with the Islamic Movement holds four; Hadash, a Jewish-Arab party -- which makes it Arab as far as most Jewish Israelis are concerned -- holds four. A handful of Arab and Druze Mks sit in the Zionist parties, like Kadima and Likud.

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Iran-watchers in the West may be pleased to find Tehran's political leadership so seemingly willing to oblige the primary intention of the latest international sanctions -- namely, to sow discord among Iranian elites.

In recent weeks, the Iranian media has been chronicling the public feuds between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and seemingly everyone else in the entire country. Ahmadinejad versus the Majles (the Iranian parliament); Ahmadinejad versus the judiciary chief; Ahmadinejad versus the bazaar merchants, some of the country's most powerful economic players; Ahmadinejad versus the conservative Motalefeh party; Ahmadinejad versus some of the country's most powerful and influential hard-line clerics. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei finally entered the fray in late August, demanding that the feuding politicians set aside their differences, at least publicly, and instead work together toward the betterment of the country.

To some, Khamenei's plea may have seemed a sign of desperation, a signal that the regime was unraveling under the weight of economic mismanagement, the effect of sanctions, and the lingering discontent over last year's election results and the aftermath of state-sanctioned violence. But that's little more than wishful thinking dressed up as political analysis. In truth, the latest squabbling is business as usual in the byzantine Iranian political system.

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Yesterday, President Obama gave a speech formally announcing the end to U.S. combat missions in Iraq, noting that this "completes a transition to Iraqi responsibility for their own security" and "reflects our long-term partnership with Iraq...based upon mutual interests, and mutual respect." As America and Iraq approached this moment of transition, The Middle East Channel examined U.S. policy toward Iraq in depth:  

Breaking Dawn: building a long-term strategic partnership with Iraq by Colin H. Kahl.
Kahl, the deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, in a detailed analysis offers assurances that despite the end in combat missions, the U.S. will "continue to remain fully engaged in its whole-of-government approach to encouraging the development of a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq."

Today's Iraq redeployment made possible by our deadline by Brian Katulis and Lawrence Korb
Katulis and Korb, from the Center for American Progress, argue that the U.S. deadline to leave Iraq, rather than the surge, created the conducive climate for re-deployment from Iraq.

Why the Iraq milestone matters by Marc Lynch
Lynch argues that President Obama deserves credit for seizing what was likely the only opportunity to start the end of the war, and for living up to his commitments.

Inheriting Iraq by Jared Mondschein
Don't miss this gripping photo essay, which captures images of Iraq since President Obama took office.

As he sat down to have coffee on a sweltering August day in Istanbul, the first words my interlocutor, a well-known Kurdish intellectual named Orhan Miroglu, uttered were about the death of his three cousins in his ancestral village in Batman, a province in the heart of the Kurdish region of Turkey. The previous night, his cousins and a fourth villager had gone to investigate a suspicious fire on the outskirts of their village. As they approached, a mine destroyed their vehicle, killing them all. All of them had been members of Kurdish political parties or human rights groups. They were the latest casualties in a war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an insurgent group that enjoys a great deal of support among Kurds.

Turkey is in the grip of a summer of senseless violence. A little over a week before the attacks in Batman, on July 25, a clash erupted in the western town of Inegol when an ordinary quarrel between a Turk and a Kurd quickly spread after assuming a racial undertone. Just a few days later, four police officers were murdered in the southern province of Hatay. This was a mirror image of the Batman event; it appears as if rogue elements in the security forces had set up an ambush to blame the other side. This killing, however, was followed by intense interethnic clashes as local Turks took to the streets to exact revenge on their Kurdish neighbors.

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Sept. 1 marks the change of the U.S. military mission in Iraq from combat to stability operations, successfully fulfilling the vision laid out by President Barack Obama at Camp LeJeuene in February 2009. Operation Iraqi Freedom has ended, and Operation New Dawn has begun. For the United States, this change of mission represents an important milestone in the transition from a primarily military-led effort in Iraq to a civilian-led one. This change of mission also marks a milestone in the full transition of responsibility for security to our Iraqi partners, continuing a process which began on Jan. 1, 2009, when the U.S.-Iraq Security Agreement (SA) came into effect.

Under President Obama's direction, more than 90,000 U.S. forces have already responsibly departed Iraq. Over the next 16 months, the remaining 50,000-strong transitional force will focus on three primary missions: training, equipping, advising, and supporting the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF); partnered counter-terrorism operations; and protecting and enabling U.S. and international civilian partners in their continued capacity-building efforts. Our forces will also continue their responsible drawdown in compliance with the SA by Dec. 31, 2011. The growing capabilities of the ISF, coupled with the deepening commitment among Iraqis to resolving their outstanding grievances through the political process, have allowed the drawdown to continue without undermining security. 

Although our military presence and mission have changed, no one should interpret our troop drawdown as U.S. disengagement from Iraq. On the contrary, the United States remains, and will continue to remain, fully engaged in its whole-of-government approach to encouraging the development of a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq. The nature of our engagement is shifting, as it must, but our commitment to Iraq is undiminished. Instead of representing disengagement, the change of military mission should instead be viewed for what it is: the next natural step toward building a long-term strategic partnership based on mutual interests and mutual respect between the United States and a fully sovereign Iraq -- a core objective we share with the Iraqi government and people.  

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In his Iraq speech tonight, President Obama has an opportunity to explain to Americans how the United States and Iraq got to the point where the combat mission had to end by a date certain and explain how his administration can apply these lessons to the ongoing struggle in Afghanistan.

Conventional wisdom among America's foreign policy establishment is that setting deadlines for troop withdrawals from war zones are detrimental for U.S. national security. But this foreign policy establishment is just as wrong about why America is leaving Iraq by a date certain as they were about why we had to go to war in Iraq in the first place.

The narrative constructed by those who advocated that the U.S. increase, or surge, of more troops into Iraq in 2007 goes something like this: President Bush's troop increase demonstrated that our commitment was open-ended and allowed the military to implement a real counterinsurgency strategy that paved the way to "victory." But a closer examination of the facts demonstrates that the opposite is true -- in Iraq, violence declined because more Iraqis perceived that U.S. troops were leaving and took appropriate action.

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On the eve of the official end of major combat operations in Iraq, Foreign Policy assembled a photo essay of the event and images that have defined the country since President Barack Obama's election. As Operation Iraqi Freedom gives way to Operation New Dawn, here are the scenes that have defined the war Obama never wanted.

View the photo essay.