U.S. Policy

As international pressure on the Iranian government toughens, the Iranian regime is facing more fragmentation at home. In an unprecedented action against a sitting president, 150 of the 290 members of the Iranian Majlis (parliament) signed a letter blaming President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad for raging inflation and high unemployment, and criticizing

On January 17, 2007, Institute counselor and Ziegler distinguished fellow Dennis Ross testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The following is the prepared text of his remarks. I have been asked to discuss Iraq in a regional context. I interpret the request to be less about how

On January 14, in a rare show of unity, Sunni and Shiite Arab, Turkmen, and Christian Iraqis gathered at a conference in Ankara to denounce Kurdish plans to incorporate Kirkuk, the capital of Iraq’s at-Tamim province, into the Kurdish region. This comes after recent violence in Kirkuk, including a December

Precisely because expectations of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's trips to the Middle East usually plunge lower than the Dead Sea, she seems to feel that she can quietly gauge receptivity to new approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian situation without setting off world headlines. As President George W. Bush puts

In early September, as Kofi Annan passed through the Middle East on a farewell journey as United Nations secretary general, he made a stop in Tehran. There, in a meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, Iran’s president, he heard something startling. As later recounted to the New York Times by an Annan

Hafez el Assad, the father of Syrian President Bashar Assad, established Syria's primacy in the Levant and transformed a country ravaged by nearly 30 coups in 24 years into a country led by one leader for nearly 30. The elder Assad made sure that Syria manipulated events in the Middle

On December 12, 2006, Robert Satloff, Dennis Ross, and Mehdi Khalaji addressed The Washington Institute’s Special Policy Forum. Robert Satloff is the Institute’s executive director and author of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands. Dennis Ross, the Institute’s counselor and Ziegler distinguished fellow

Two years ago, during the month of Ramadan, a bus carrying 50 Iraqi soldiers heading home on leave was ambushed outside Baghdad. The soldiers were led out of the bus, lined up on the pavement, and killed -- like so many other Iraqi soldiers, policemen, and recruits trained by the

President Bush and his advisers were not the only ones who were anxious about what the Iraq Study Group would recommend. So were the Saudis, which explains why they sought an urgent meeting between King Abdullah and Vice President Cheney in late November. The source of Saudi anxiety was almost