Policy Analysis

For much of the upcoming presidential election season, the United States will no doubt be preoccupied with domestic affairs on the one hand, and the postwar transition in Iraq on the other. Although Washington undoubtedly hopes for a quiet year in the Middle East, reality might bring less desirable results

SHAUL BAKHASH The autocratic features of the Islamic Republic of Iran have demonstrated remarkable durability over the past twenty-five years. The defining characteristic of the Iranian political system is the concentration of authority in the person of the Supreme Religious Leader, who has vast powers under the constitution. In some

The Bush administration has recently circulated to its G-8 partners the details of the Greater Middle East Partnership (GMEP) that Washington hopes will win endorsement at the group's May 2004 summit in Sea Island, Georgia. The GMEP is a core element of the administration's larger Greater Middle East Initiative, which

On February 12, 2004, Paula Dobriansky addressed The Washington Institute's Special Policy Forum. As the undersecretary of state for global affairs, Dr. Dobriansky is the senior State Department official responsible for a broad range of transnational issues, including democracy, human rights, labor, counternarcotics, law enforcement, refugees, humanitarian relief, and environmental

Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee As the prospects for even limited bilateral Israeli-Palestinian agreements have grown increasingly more remote, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has announced his intention to withdraw nearly all the Israeli settlements from the Gaza strip. It is a revolutionary move that creates the possibility of

Mohammed Zuul, 23, blew himself up Sunday on a bus in the middle of Jerusalem, killing eight other people and wounding 50 more. The attack came on the eve of hearings in The Hague on whether Israel had the right to construct a fence to protect itself from assaults like

To no one's surprise, the Iranian parliamentary elections resulted in a conservative sweep; the hardliners had rigged the rules so as to prevent a serious contest. As the hardliners consolidate their control, they may be interested in improving relations with the United States, though a major initiative would likely appear

On February 5, 2004, a German court acquitted Abdelghani Mzoudi, a thirty-one-year-old native Moroccan, of 3,066 counts of accessory to murder and membership in a terrorist organization (al-Qaeda). Mzoudi is suspected of having provided material and financial support to the Hamburg cell that helped organize and perpetrate the terrorist attacks

Today's meeting between President George W. Bush and visiting Tunisian president Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali may be a low-profile event with a leader of a country in which the United States has only limited strategic interests. Yet, the repercussions of their luncheon tete-a-tete for the administration's larger objective of Arab

The violent incidents that have occurred in Iraq since the beginning of this month illustrate the diverse faces of Iraqi resistance. The terrorist-style attacks in Iskandariyah and Baghdad on February 10 and 11 drew much attention to the presumed links of terrorist organizations to anti-occupation incidents. Although resistance elements do

On February 9, 2004, Patrick Clawson, Soner Cagaptay, Jeffrey White, and Jonathan Schanzer addressed The Washington Institute's Special Policy Forum. All four were part of the Institute fact-finding delegation tasked with conducting an independent survey of local security conditions and emerging political currents in Iraq. The delegation traveled throughout Iraq

Thursday's front page of the New York Times has a breathless account of Pakistan's rogue nuclear network, and quotes British engineer Peter Griffin as saying he had been a supplier to Pakistan for two decades. To my knowledge, the last time Peter Griffin was quoted anywhere was on the front

On February 9, 2004, Jeffrey White, Jonathan Schanzer, Patrick Clawson, and Soner Cagaptay addressed The Washington Institute's Special Policy Forum. All four were part of the Institute fact-finding delegation tasked with conducting an independent survey of local security conditions and emerging political currents in Iraq. The delegation traveled throughout Iraq

Testimony before the House Committee on International Relations. Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas have now met and declared an end to ongoing hostilities. Are we about to see peace made between the Israelis and Palestinians? No, but we may finally see an end to the war that has governed the

Less than a year ago, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon rejected the idea of a unilateral pullback from Gaza, telling Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna that isolated settlements such as Netzarim were equal to Tel Aviv in his eyes. Last week, however, Sharon—a leading architect of Israel's settlement movement—declared his

Since June, intermittent reports have suggested Riyadh was on the verge of taking firm action against terror financiers among the Saudi elite. After a series of unexplained delays, a U.S. delegation visiting the Saudi capital in December finally secured Saudi agreement to shut the offices of the al Haramain Foundation

Pundits and politicians alike tend to think of the war on terror against al Qaeda as a completely disparate phenomenon from the battle against other terrorist groups. This is, in part, a logical supposition as groups like Hamas and Hezbollah do not belong to the more tightly knit family of

Al-Manar (the beacon) is the official television station of the Lebanon-based Hizbullah, the Iranian-supported Shi'ite movement that appears on every U.S. terrorism list. Many political movements and organizations in the Arab world publish in print, and some even have clandestine radio stations. Terrorist groups such as al-Qa'ida have been especially

Between September 1993 and September 2000, the Middle East was the setting for a great historical experiment: the effort to negotiate a final resolution of the decades-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The experiment failed, and disastrously so. Oslo diplomacy -- which takes its name from the site of the

The current situation in Iraq constitutes a unique moment in the history of the Islamic Middle East. For the first time, Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, and Assyrians of the same nation have an opportunity to cooperatively evaluate the task of shaping their shared future. The challenge between now and June 30