Policy Analysis

Media reportage on yesterday's meeting between President George W. Bush and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has focused on Bush's letter to Sharon as a political windfall for the latter. Some analysts suggest that in his letter Bush prejudged the outcome of an eventual final-status deal between Israel and the

The exchange of letters that occurred yesterday between President George W. Bush and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon marked an important watershed in the diplomatic history of the Middle East peace process. The short-term impact of the correspondence will be felt in domestic Israeli politics, as Sharon tries to parlay

Tomorrow's meeting in Washington, D.C., between President George W. Bush and visiting British prime minister Tony Blair was scheduled before the recent outbreaks of violence in Iraq and before Wednesday's announcement of U.S. support for Israel's plan to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza. But both subjects will top the agenda of

Israelis and Palestinians are locked in a stalemate that is worsening over time. The withdrawal initiative by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon creates an opportunity to transform the situation, but the direction of that transformation remains an unanswered question. Many Palestinians view an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and an evacuation

The battle for Falluja, in which U.S. forces have been fighting to break Sunni resistance elements in that city, has been one of the most sustained fights of the Iraq war and subsequent occupation. Significantly, Sunni insurgents are not only fighting in Falluja, but also across the Sunni heartland. Militarily

This week, President George W. Bush is scheduled to hold summit meetings with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The heart of both meetings will likely contain discussions surrounding Sharon's plan for Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and from a symbolic four settlements in the West Bank

The 101st Airborne's Experience in Iraq The 101st Airborne Division returned to the United States in February after spending most of the previous year stationed throughout Iraq's four northernmost provinces. Although the division was engaged in daily combat with insurgent forces in its mission to provide security, it was also

It's not often that William Safire and Al Jazeera agree but, in the last week, both have drawn explicit comparisons between the anti-Western anger rolling through central and southern Iraq and the relative calm of the Kurdish north. In Iraqi Kurdistan, Safire wrote Wednesday, "we can see success: Rival Kurdish

Faced with both the Muqtada al-Sadr uprising and intense fighting in Ramadi and Fallujah, Washington announced that it will hold the number of U.S. forces in Iraq at the current level of 134,000 by delaying plans to withdraw some troops during the current rotation. The announcement is a recognition that

In mid-April, President George W. Bush will be holding summit meetings with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. The heart of both meetings will likely contain discussions surrounding Sharon's plan for Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and from a symbolic four settlements in the West Bank. Advantages—and

Over the past week, Muqtada al-Sadr, a leading radical Shi'i cleric in Iraq, has begun to launch direct, violent challenges to the coalition's authority. After a relatively quiet period of organization and preparation, Sadr and his faction have emerged as an even more dangerous factor in an already unstable security

The next few days will be crucial. Yesterday saw the first armed confrontations between coalition forces and the gunmen who support the young Shia Muslim firebrand, Moqtada al-Sadr. Today the Americans are hitting back with Apache helicopters. The action is across the whole of the Shia south, the area that

Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon arrives in Washington on April 14 to present President George W. Bush with his plan for "unilateral disengagement" from the Gaza Strip. Details of the plan still need to be nailed down, while the fate of Sharon (facing the possibility of bribery charges) and that

The year 2004 will go down in the annals of history as the year when NATO met the Greater Middle East. In the Istanbul summit on June 28-29, NATO is planning to admit seven Eastern European countries, thereby extending its borders to the Caucasus and the Middle East. Over the

This book is available only in PDF format. Download a free PDF (10 MB). Due to a number of daunting obstacles, a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems out of reach for the foreseeable future. Longstanding mistrust and bitterness persist between the two peoples, and the upsurge in Palestinian

Shows the proximity of key Israeli population centers to the boundaries of the northern West Bank. From the 2004 Institute monograph A Defensible Fence: Fighting Terror and Enabling a Two-State Solution. Copyright 2004 The Washington Institute

The successes and operational failures of Israel's security fence along the Gaza border in the mid-1990s offer lessons for efforts to secure the West Bank frontier.

On March 28, 2004, Turks voted in nationwide municipal elections for the mayors of more than 3,000 cities and towns, as well as administrative council members for all eighty-one Turkish provinces. Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) won an overwhelming victory, increasing its national standing. With 41.8 percent of

The attack that killed 185 Shi'a Muslims in Iraq during the religious festival of Ashura bore the hallmarks of operations planned by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to US Central Command. Matthew Levitt examines Zarqawi's role as a co-ordinator of diverse extremist networks in Iraq and beyond. According to General John

Thirty months after the massive World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, al-Qaeda is a significantly different organization, thanks to the successful efforts of the U.S.-led war on terror. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the threat of "global jihad" posed by al-Qaeda has diminished just because the organization