سوريا

The Obama administration's announcement yesterday specifically sanctioning Syrian President Bashar al-Asad begins to clear the fog that has clouded policy toward this pivotal country since the outbreak of mass protests weeks ago. As U.S. and international leaders have grappled with popular uprisings across the Middle East, the tension between moral

The Syrian government has stepped up its campaign to quash a seven-week uprising, reportedly using tanks to fire on cities. At least twenty people and two Syrian soldiers died in the latest clashes. Larisa Epatko of PBS NewsHour asked Andrew J. Tabler, a Next Generation fellow in The Washington Institute's

On April 13, 2011, May Chidiac, Michael Young, Hisham Melhem, and Michael Doran addressed a Policy Forum at The Washington Institute. Ms. Chidiac, president of MCF Media Institute, was for decades a news anchor and on-air personality for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. Mr. Young is opinion editor for the Beirut

The key to dealing with the Assad regime is to always keep your options open and be prepared to walk away with no obligations. Only by making clear when it will do so, and what will be the consequences, will Washington ever have a hope of getting a straight answer out of the Syrian president.

During the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Syria's Assad regime was helping insurgents to cross the border and kill Americans. In response to the Syrian provocation, the Bush administration considered a broad range of policy options. But one family of options always remained off the table: regime change or any combination of pressures that might destabilize Damascus. At the Department of Defense, we held a dissenting view.

With anti-Asad regime protests in Syria raging for a seventh straight day, with reports of significant numbers killed, the United States should consider designating under Treasury Department sanctions Mahar al-Asad, Bashar's brother and head of the elite units of the Republican Guard.

The outbreak of anti-regime protests in Damascus offers the Obama administration an opportunity to reiterate America's call for universal freedoms and to push for change in a country that consistently aligns itself against Washington.

The seemingly never-ending story of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which was established by the U.N. Security Council to prosecute the killers of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, reached a landmark this week when the court's prosecutor submitted his indictment to pretrial judge Daniel Fransen. Diplomats from Washington to

President Obama assumed office in 2009 with an ambitious Middle East policy agenda. Atop the list of his campaign pledges, then Senator Obama vowed to pursue Israeli-Palestinian peace and re-engage in diplomacy with Tehran and Damascus. Given these grand plans, perhaps not surprisingly the first two years of the Obama