Power, Faith, and Fantasy: A Review SYRACUSE, New York: Michael Oren´s latest political/historical work could possibly top his previous widely acclaimed bestseller, The Six Days War . His new book Power, Faith, and Fantasy provides a historical background of America´s involvement in the Middle East, beginning at the dawn of a new American democracy. As …
Running, managing, and editing a newspaper is very much like operating on a battlefield, sticking it out in the muddied trenches with your troops, barking orders at the crack of dawn and ensuring that the men s morale is always high. At The Daily Star Egypt, there developed a sense of Semper Fi as the …
Paul Wolfowitz – former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, one of the most influential neoconservatives of President George W. Bush’s administration and a key architect of the Iraq war – has been forced to resign in disgrace from his current post as President of the World Bank. Technically, his resignation comes because of ‘ethical lapses’ …
Today, we all can feel good about Northern Ireland. Protestants and Catholics–Unionists and Republicans in local parlance–are about to jointly run their government. Belfast, for decades the scene of urban terrorism and the deaths of so many innocents, has become a city of peace and possibility. We participated in this process as envoys for the …
President George W. Bush and his senior military and foreign-policy advisers are beginning to discuss a “post-surge strategy for Iraq which they hope could gain bipartisan political support. The new policy would focus on training and advising Iraqi troops rather than the broader goal of achieving a political reconciliation in Iraq, which senior officials recognize …
On an average-size map of the world, there is no space to mark the locations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. On one map, the former is outlined by a barely visible light blue line; Gaza is hidden behind the ‘m’ in the word Jerusalem. And that’s it. A speck on the globe. …
In recent years I and others have been warning that the growing number of conflicts in the Middle East is pushing the region toward new forms of radicalism and trouble. The clashes between the Lebanese Army and the Fatah Al-Islam extremist militants that have rocked parts of North Lebanon since Sunday are the latest face …
Not everything dies when it should, and the report of the Iraq Study Group, released late last year, is a grim example. Even at the time it was issued, it was a remarkably vacuous and unrealistic report. Its key recommendations were hopelessly impractical and the detail report – while good on some aspects of historical …
Islam is often perceived as a potential threat to democratization, and justifications for this view tend to repeat ad nauseam the idea that for Islam, there is no separation between politics and religion. In the West, politics based on individual rights (as opposed to the common good) and religion as independent of the state have …
Confronting the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991, former European Union Council President Jacques Poos made his famous but now derided statement: “This is the hour of Europe . not the hour of the Americans. What the EU learned from the subsequent four years of Balkan disasters under its management is now being tested by another …
Turkey is interested in the fate of the Kirkuk region of Iraq for three main reasons. First, Turkish policy-makers perceive the insistence of Iraqi Kurdish leaders to include the region within the Kurdish Regional Government as a sign of their intention to break away from Iraq. According to this view, Iraqi Kurdish leaders want to …
Founded by Muhammad Baqer Al-Sadr and inspired by his ideas of Wilayat Al-Ummah (rule of the community), the Iraqi Daawa party has evolved from an underground movement espousing Islamic revolution to a major player in an Iraqi democratic government. The party has undergone tectonic ideological shifts but still faces major challenges in mobilizing support if …
JERUSALEM: In Israel, the concept of security is a powerful one. It is used to justify all military activity, including the occupation of Palestinian territories and the vast budgets applied to it. Indeed, a mystique has developed around security – national security is a phrase invoked not just to increase military budgets, but also to …
The 17th session of the Joint Council between the European Community and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states was held on May 8, 2007, in Riyadh. Since the previous joint council meeting in Brussels in May 2006, expectations had been high that the Riyadh meeting would produce consensus on the long-awaited Free Trade Agreement (FTA), …
In Israel, the concept of security is a powerful one. It is used to justify all military activity, including the occupation of Palestinian territories and the vast budgets applied to it. Indeed, a mystique has developed around security – national security is a phrase invoked not just to increase military budgets, but also to silence …
America set a long clock ticking when it decided to spend $300 million to rebuild the sprawling military base here in Taji, Iraq, as a logistical center for the new Iraqi army. This was to be the soldier s version of nation-building – maintenance depots, orderly barracks and professional schools for Iraqi officers and NCOs. …
Egyptian human rights organizations and dissidents are expressing a wary optimism towards Egypt joining the United Nations Human Rights Council. Egypt became one of the new African members, along with Angola, Madasgascar, and South Africa, of the council last Wednesday, easily winning a strong victory in the United Nations General Assembly, where it collected 168 …
In a move that affirms its belief that regional problems need regional solutions, Saudi Arabia scored yet another diplomatic victory by brokering a deal between Sudan and Chad to quell spillover fighting from the Darfur crisis. While the impact will become clearer in the months ahead, there is no denying that the recent accord – …
I write this from Sweimeh, on the Dead Sea in Jordan, at the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) Middle Eastern gathering of business, government, civil society and media leaders. Visible across the Dead Sea to the west is the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank and Jerusalem, and further west is Gaza, ravaged by Palestinian in-fighting, Israeli …
After his ill-advised dismissal of the chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court ignited a firestorm of violent protests, President General Pervez Musharraf may be banking on Islamic fanatics to create chaos in the nation’s capital, Islamabad. Many suspect that an engineered bloodbath that leads to army intervention, and the declaration of a national emergency, could …
Many people, with or without a connection to Iraq, to Kurdistan or to Kirkuk, seem to have a ready-made opinion regarding the way to solve the Kirkuk issue. Some say let past injustice be past injustice and live with the new reality. Some compare the situation in Kirkuk with states absorbing immigrants, arguing that to …
I recently travelled to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, to participate in the second Arab Broadcast Forum (ABF). The forum is a remarkable gathering of broadcast journalists from across the Arab world and reporters and representatives from media outlets covering the Middle East. (The network that broadcasts my weekly programme Viewpoint …
If you will not pay us reasonable prices for our exports, we will export ourselves It s the kind of “it s-not-fair situation that makes poorer nations wonder where the pay-off is with free trade: Demand for coffee, tea, cocoa, cotton, and sugar – which is what many such countries have to offer the world …
Arab journalists, more than any other journalists around the world, need security. They need physical security and economic security as well as the security of strong laws and regulations. Being an independent journalist in the Arab world is not a very safe profession. If you are working in the two most media-productive areas in the …
A family in Kosovo has just named their new born son Tonibler, after – I kid you not – the United Kingdom s outgoing Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom the family credit for saving them from Serbian tyranny and violence. Somehow I doubt that Blair, who formerly, not to mention finally, announced he will leave …
With the political standoff surrounding the selection of a new president intensifying, Turkey is entering a critical period that could have a profound effect on both the country’s internal evolution as a secular democracy and its relations with the West. The presidential candidacy of the moderate Islamist Abdullah Gul, currently the foreign minister, has been …
Since its victory in the Cold War, America’s global hegemony has rested on three pillars: economic power, military might, and a vast capacity to export its popular culture. The recent emergence of additional powers – the European Union, China, India, and a Russia driven to recover its lost status – has eroded America’s capacity to …
The American benchmarks plan that was recently submitted to both Israelis and Palestinians is a very significant step. It marks an important and useful change of gear for American involvement in the conflict in an apparent effort to arrest the deteriorating economic and political Palestinian situation. It doesn t, however, include anything new at all. …
For a small country that usually does not make much news, Jordan is making a claim on the world’s attention this week with a series of fascinating consecutive events. King Abdullah II of Jordan has chosen the path of dynamic activism and big initiatives as the route to national well-being, though many around the world …
The whole sorry Wolfowitz affair looks like it is finally drawing to a close. It is hard to believe he will stay on much longer at the World Bank, and it is time to start thinking more closely about the future of that institution. From the first, I was critical of the way he was …
