Democracy & Reform

When I served on the staff of the 9/11 Commission, one of our primary tasks was to assemble the story of how al Qaeda's plot developed. One of the aspects of the plot on which we focused our attention was, therefore, the movements, activities, and associations of the 19 hijackers

What issues are of concern to ordinary Saudis? How does the average citizen view the state of the domestic economy? What are the prevailing public attitudes toward religious extremism? As in most countries, long-term stability in Saudi Arabia is ultimately dependent -- to one degree or another -- on popular

Until recently, the Iraqi elections on March 7, 2010 seemed likely to showcase the growing maturity of local democracy and offer the United States a chance to claim some success and, more importantly, a mandate to withdraw troops. The election would mark the third time a peaceful transfer of power

On January 6 -- Christmas Eve according to the Eastern Orthodox calendar -- six Coptic Christians and a policeman were killed in a drive-by shooting while exiting church in Naga Hammadi, Upper Egypt. The attack, which came in retaliation to an alleged rape of a twelve-year-old Muslim girl by a

Rising social violence between Kurds and non-Kurds in Turkey, with daily incidents occurring, is an unusual, and therefore alarming, phenomenon. This violence has been spurred as much by the recent Kurdish opening, which has created a backlash against Kurdish nationalism, as it has been by the closing of the Kurdish

A new opportunity is now emerging for the "Green Movement" in Iran to demonstrate opposition to the Islamic Republic and the manipulated presidential election results earlier this year. Friday, December 18, marks the beginning of the months of Muharram and Safar in the Islamic lunar calendar. For the regime in

In a speech in Washington, DC in August 2008, Ted Gistaro, then the United States national intelligence officer for transnational threats, painted a picture of a resurgent Al-Qaeda core, with an increasingly secure safe-haven in Pakistan's tribal areas. Al-Qaeda had, in Gistaro's view, "maintained or strengthened key elements of its

FEATURING Dan Meridor, Ataollah Mohajerani, Aharon Farkash, Jackson Diehl, Michael Mandelbaum, Hossein Bastani, Khalil Shikaki, Mortimer Zuckerman, Ronald Neumann, Charles Wald, and many other distinguished speakers The Proceedings In June 2009, President Barack Obama traveled to Cairo to deliver a speech outlining what he hoped would mark a "new beginning"

During the 1960s, Egypt and Saudi Arabia fought an eight-year proxy war in Yemen so fierce that Egypt repeatedly deployed chemical weapons against its Saudi-backed adversaries, the Yemeni royalists. Fifty years on, the revolutionary ideology of Egypt's former president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, is a distant memory, and while Cairo and