Posted By P.J. Dermer, Steven White Tuesday, November 22, 2011 - 5:58 PM
In light of the
resignation of the National Security Council's Dennis Ross, and as the
international community waits for the United Nations to
consider Palestine's road to formal statehood, we call upon the Obama
administration and so-called Middle East experts advising the various
presidential hopefuls to take some introspective "down time." The purpose is to reassess heretofore
time-honored policies, practices, political campaign pronouncements, and come up
with a realistic and viable way forward.
It is clear that
Obama's efforts toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire have been
nothing short of a failure. When tallying on to previous failed administration
attempts, the cumulative effect has been a clear loss of strategic
leverage. This loss is detrimental to the
U.S. interest of securing two states living side by side in peace in the region,
as well as influencing the likes of Syria and Iran at a critical time. This trend must be reversed and replaced by
revitalized action on a critical U.S. national security issue.
Posted By Matthew Duss, Michael Cohen Monday, March 21, 2011 - 3:14 PM
As the United States
and its European allies launch attacks against the regime of Libyan strongman
Muammar Gaddhafi, it seems almost poignant that this third military
intervention in a Muslim country in the last decade began nearly eight years to
the day that the United States
invaded Iraq.
It is a fitting reminder that even as 50,000 soldiers remain in Iraq, and American
soldiers continue to be killed and maimed there, the lessons of that disastrous
decision to go to war remain largely unlearned by many in the foreign policy
community.
At the outset it's important to acknowledge the key differences in
the manner in which these interventions have been undertaken and the differing
levels of international and regional legitimacy that they possess. But it is
the similarities that are more disquieting. The U.S. has yet again become involved
in a military effort of indeterminate length, justified through a questionable
definition of national interest and with little forethought to the long-term
consequences of utilizing military force. It seems the costs and consequences
of Iraq
have simply not been fully appreciated by policymakers and pundits. A full
accounting is therefore in order.
Posted By Burhanettin Duran, Nuh Yilmaz Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - 4:32 PM
Political
demonstrations in Tunisia
and Egypt
have sparked a century old discussion: Is Turkey a model for the Middle East? Two contemporary
examples of the "Turkey-as-a-model" debate
show how this issue can play out:
Turkey was presented as a moderate Islamic, democratic model for the Middle
East as part of George W. Bush's "freedom agenda," and more recently as part of
Barack Obama's democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East. It is ironic
that in 2010 the debate revolved around concepts such as a "shift of axis,"
"torn country," and "drifting away," but now Turkey
has transformed from a "lost" ally to a "model" country.
Interestingly enough,
Islamist actors such as Rachid Ghannouchi of Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood
of Egypt declared their intention to emulate the Turkish experience in order to
differentiate themselves from the examples of Iran
and Taliban. How is it that Turkey
is presented as a model country by political actors as varied as high-level U.S.
officials and Islamist groups? To make sense of this irony, one needs to
consider the questions:
whose model and which Turkey?
In fact, there are
three main political groups with competing narratives on what the Turkish model
means.
Posted By Anna Theofilopoulou, Jacob Mundy Thursday, August 12, 2010 - 6:06 PM
Sept
In what is possibly a first for the
mainstream U.S. media, New York Times columnist Nicholas
Kristof recently
noted some of the parallels between Israel's
occupation of Palestinian lands and Morocco's
attempted annexation of Western Sahara:
It's fair to acknowledge that there are double standards in the Middle East, with particular scrutiny on Israeli abuses.
After all, the biggest theft of Arab land in the Middle East has nothing to do
with Palestinians: It is Morocco's
robbery of the resource-rich Western Sahara
from the people who live there.
And just as one would expect, Morocco's ambassador to the United States, Aziz Mekouar, issued a prompt
retort denying that Western Sahara was ever
stolen. But the ambassador's logic was a bit fuzzy. "Far from stealing Western
Sahara," Mekouar argued, "Morocco
has offered the region autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty." Which is like
saying that theft is not theft if you are willing to sell the stolen object
back to the victims for a good price.
Eleven years ago, current king of Morocco, Mohammed VI, inherited one of the
world's oldest thrones together with
one of Africa's most intractable conflicts, the Western
Sahara dispute. For his father, King Hassan II, the seizure of
Western Sahara from Spain
became a blessing and a curse. It was arguably Hassan's greatest achievement
and yet Western Sahara soon became the
greatest challenge to the consolidation of the post-colonial Moroccan state.
Over a decade into his rule, Mohammed VI has yet to find a way to make good on
his father's conquest and legacy in the contested Western
Sahara.
Posted By Simon Henderson Monday, June 28, 2010 - 8:08 PM
What will be the image that frames the news reporting of June 29's White House meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? Surely not another bow toward the
desert monarch, as caught on video at the London G-20 meeting in April 2009. Or what
hypercritics saw as a further deferential bob in Riyadh last June, when the president leaned forward so the shorter king could confer on him the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit, a chunky necklace that Obama took off within seconds.
Of course, what the White House staff most wants to avoid is any image as awkward as the shot of President George W. Bush and then Crown Prince Abdullah walking arm in arm at the start of a meeting at Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch in April 2002. The shot was memorialized by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 and, with Moore himself superimposed in place of Abdullah, became the poster for the movie, plastered on thousands of theater walls across the United States.
Posted By F. Gregory Gause, III Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 5:38 PM
Last week, my friend Steven Cook valiantly stepped to the plate to defend the counter-intuitive proposition that the neocons got some things right on the Middle East. Cook is a known baseball fan, so I assume that it was the beginning of spring training which inspired him to step up to this particular plate. He took three good cuts, identifying Syria, Iran and democracy as the things the neocons correctly interpreted -- but he whiffed on each. Three strikes, and you are out. Unfortunately, the neocons are not out of the game despite their horrific track record on the biggest issues in the Middle East -- and now is not the time to be soft-pedaling their failures or rehabilitating their image.
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