by Emile Nakhleh In a speech before the United Nations on Wednesday, President Barack Obama offered a rhetorically eloquent roadmap on how to fight the Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS) in Iraq and Syria. He called on Muslim youth to reject the extremist ideology of ISIS and al-Qaeda and work toward a more promising future.
How Egypt’s Generals Sidelined Uncle Sam
by Dilip Hiro
Since September 11, 2001, Washington’s policies in the Middle East have proven a grim imperial comedy of errors and increasingly a spectacle of how a superpower is sidelined. In this drama, barely noticed by the American media, Uncle Sam’s keystone ally in the Arab world, Egypt, like [...]
via LobeLog
by Thomas W. Lippman
An Arabic-speaking friend who has been doing business in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf for decades and seems to know everyone there invited me to lunch the other day. He wanted to know if I could make sense of developments in Saudi Arabia over the past six months.
[...]
via LobeLob
by Daniel Wagner, Giorgio Cafiero, and Sufyan bin Uzayr*
Since the revolutions that swept across the Middle East in 2011, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government has arrested dozens of Emirati and Egyptian nationals allegedly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Declaring the MB a threat to the UAE’s [...]
via LobeLog
by Derek Davison
Over the next few months, citizens in several Middle Eastern countries will take to the polls in a series of elections that will have a good deal to say about the direction the region’s politics will take. From Turkey, to Syria, to Iraq, to Egypt, there is [...]
via LobeLog
by Wayne White
Last week, Jasmin Ramsey pointed out how problematic the recent US decision to deliver attack helicopters to Egypt is in terms of US human rights policy. The move also portrays the US as actively taking sides in a conflict pitting a repressive regime against armed opposition, with potentially [...]
via LobeLog
by Emile Nakhleh
The Bahraini Arabic language newspaper al-Wasat reported on April 9 that a Cairo court began to consider a case brought by an Egyptian lawyer against Qatar accusing it of being soft on terrorism. The “terrorism” charge is of course a euphemism for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt, Saudi [...]
via LobeLog
by Henry Precht
They used to say during the Cold War that the Pentagon was prepared to fight two and a half wars at the same time. Actually, I can’t think of such a fraught moment in post-World War II history. Vietnam came along after Korea; Reagan took on Grenada and Panama [...]
via LobeLog
by Wayne White
When I first walked the streets of Algiers back in 1975, the city was decked out in banners heralding a visit from North Korean tyrant Kim Il Sung. Algeria’s foreign policy radicalism of those days shifted to a far more moderate pragmatism over 25 years ago, but surprisingly, little [...]
via LobeLog
by Henry Precht
In the turbulent weeks after the Iranian revolution we officers in the State Department or in Embassy Tehran struggled to construct a “normal” relationship with the decidedly abnormal, strife-ridden new regime. In frustration I used to tell my wife that we should hang a thick curtain around Iran’s borders [...]
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