Middle East & North Africa Archive

Today’s Nuclear Security Summit is the largest gathering of world leaders in Washington ever hosted by an American president. Despite the importance of this event, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to skip the meeting. His move highlights the problems the world’s leaders confront in preventing the feared wave of nuclear weapons proliferation in the Middle East. Until last week, Netanyahu had indicated that he planned to attend the summit in order to bolster efforts to prevent Tehran from using its civilian nuclear program to develop a nuclear weapons capacity. In addition to the formal sessions occurring yesterday and today, […]

In Egypt, political opposition has reached a fever pitch as concerns surrounding the twilight of the Mubarak regime mount. In early March, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak flew to Germany, where a team of surgeons removed his failing gall-bladder along with a benign growth. Three weeks later, the president was back on Egyptian soil to resume his recuperation in the coastal city of Sharm-el-Sheik. That the deeply insular leader would announce his poor health was sufficient cause for concern. But if his homecoming ended wild speculation surrounding the president’s condition, Egyptians are now faced with the impending likelihood of life after […]

For those wondering how President Barack Obama planned to justify his Nobel Peace Prize, two developments last week strongly suggest that it will be by way of his dream of a “world without nuclear weapons.” The first was his successful conclusion of a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, which takes almost a third off the top of both sides’ massive nuclear arsenals. The second was Obama’s new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which declared that “preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism” was the nation’s No. 1 strategic priority. At the same time, the review offers a striking new pledge […]

Is there a method to Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s “madness”? At first glance, his recent actions — including harsh criticism of U.S. policies, a threat to join the Taliban resistance, diplomatic maneuverings in recent visits to Tehran and Beijing, and outreach to former domestic enemies — might seem “troubling” at best, and “troubled” at worst. But on closer inspection, they all appear to have a logical purpose: to hedge Karzai’s bets. From Karzai’s perspective, there are three foreseeable outcomes of the Obama administration’s “surge” in Afghanistan — and only one would be particularly beneficial to his interests. That would be […]

As the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review is released, NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown talks to Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation that promotes a nuclear-free world and Stephen Rademaker who has served in the administrations of both George H.W. and George W. Bush, focusing on arms control and proliferation issues. Cirincione says this NPR is “night and day” in comparison to the similar report conducted under the Bush administration that expanded the role of nuclear weapons in military operations. Conversely, Rademaker says that the most recent report is more verbiage than substance, with enough wiggle room to still use […]

NewsHour’s Gwen Ifill interviews New York Times reporter Rod Nordland who is on the ground in Baghdad where violence has been on the rise. Nordland says that recent attacks targeting civilians bare the mark of Al Qaida, but no one has yet claimed responsibility. While some observers suggest that the attacks are an attempt to keep U.S. forces engaged in combat, U.S. troops on the ground have left the management of the recent aggression to Iraqi forces, pressing forward with their timetable for withdrawal. All of this is happening as the Iraqi government works quickly to create a coalition government […]

Of all the changes that have transpired on the global political scene in the last year or so, few are as dramatic as the re-emergence of Syria from a Washington-led campaign of international isolation. Just a few years ago, in the aftershocks of a ground-shaking political assassination in Lebanon, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad governed a country well on its way to becoming an international pariah. With Beirut and much of the world pointing an accusing finger in Syria’s direction after the killing of two-time former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005, Damascus’ power quickly started shrinking. Shunned by its […]

When asked for his assessment of the French Revolution’s historical impact, Zhou Enlai famously replied, “It is too early to tell.” Historians are fond of citing the quotation, but at times ignore its fundamental insight: that they often arrive at their judgment of historical events prematurely. Nowhere does this seem truer than in the case of America’s controversial intervention in Iraq. For most historians, the narrative of the Iraq War terminates decisively with failure in 2006, even as the chronology of its costs is generously extended decades into the future (e.g., the famous $3 trillion estimate). Meanwhile, any successes — […]

Five years ago, in an essay in National Interest, Paul Saunders and I attempted to address the question of what victory in Iraq would look like. We concluded that success would include depriving al-Qaida of a base, closing Iraq’s borders to foreign fighters, and the emergence of a central government capable of ensuring some degree of stability, without repressive methods or too close an alignment with Iran. “Americans and others will recognize victory,” we wrote, “if we have managed to break the back of al-Qaida in Iraq and left in place an Iraqi government committed and able to prevent the […]