Lebanon

On Saturday, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri traveled to Damascus for a meeting with Syrian president Bashar Asad, the man widely believed to have ordered the assassination of his father, former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri. The 2005 murder sparked the Cedar Revolution, a mass protest movement that resulted in the

In October, Lebanon was elected to one of ten non-permanent member seats on the United Nations Security Council. Come January 2010, Lebanon will assume Asia's "Arab League" seat, replacing Libya for a two-year term on the critical international body. The UNSC seat was the brainchild of Lebanon's president Michel Suleiman

PolicyWatch #1600 is the first of a two-part series examining recent military developments involving Hizballah and Hamas. The second part will focus on Hamas's acquisition of long-range (60 km/37.5 mile) artillery rockets. On November 3, 2009, Israeli naval forces intercepted an Antigua-flagged cargo ship approximately 100 miles off Israel's coast

Ever since the end of the war in the summer of 2006 between Israel and the radical Lebanese Shiite organization, Hezbollah, there has been a major effort on the part of Hezbollah to rearm, especially with offensive weapons such as rockets and medium-range missiles. The organization has also rebuilt its

Last week, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Feisal Mekdad travelled to Washington for meetings at the State Department and White House. While the Obama administration extended the invitation some time ago, the timing of Mekdad's arrival seemed more than mere coincidence. Mekdad landed in Washington on Yom Kippur, the holiest day

Assad to Obama: Thanks but no thanks. Early last week, nearly seven months to the day after the Barack Obama administration took office and began its careful, critical engagement with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, rumors swirled in Washington and the Middle East that the White House was

The following is an excerpt from "America and the Lebanon Issue," in Lebanon: Liberation, Conflict, and Crisis, ed. Barry Rubin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Purchase this book on Amazon.com The U.S. can protect us from another superpower but not from a regional power like Israel or Syria. The U.S

Iran's fraudulent election and subsequent civil strife demonstrate that, whatever that country's people think about President Obama's desire for mutual respect, the Iranian government is determined to obstruct exactly that goal. Meanwhile, on the Arab side of the Gulf, President Obama's major address to the world's Muslims from Cairo and

As the Hizballah-led March 8 coalition campaigns ahead of Lebanon's June 7 elections, the group has been forced to contend with the unexpected exposure of its covert terrorist activities both at home and abroad. At home, Hizballah now stands accused of playing a role in the assassination of former Lebanese