Middle East & North Africa Archive

Turkish President Abdullah Gül met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak late last month to discuss bilateral relations and the Middle East peace process. In an e-mail interview, Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, discusses Turkey-Egypt bilateral relations. WPR: How would you characterize Turkish-Egyptian relations historically? Paul Salem: For most of the 20th century, Egypt and Turkey were effectively part of different “regions.” Until recently, Turkey was generally orientated toward the West — with its inclusion in the NATO alliance — and had fairly tense relations with the countries of the Arab East. Turkey was viewed suspiciously by […]

Early this Monday, a small barrage of rockets struck the Red Sea cities of Eilat, in Israel and Aqaba, in Jordan. The missiles, which appeared to come from the Sinai, inside Egyptian territory, killed one Jordanian man and injured five. While few doubted the main target of the attack was Israel, it was less clear who exactly launched the rockets. Jordanian authorities claimed they had proof the strikes had originated in Egypt, while Egypt promptly blamed Hamas, which quickly denied any responsibility. Once again, Hamas and Egypt found themselves in a familiar position — on opposite sides of a dispute. […]

President Barack Obama speaks to the national convention of Disabled American Veterans about the impending troop withdrawal from Iraq, with an emphasis on the country’s dedication to its veterans. Click here for WPR’s Richard Weitz’s take on the speech.

In his assessment on how things could have been different in Afghanistan, David Sanger in Sunday’s New York Times repeats one of the fixed assumptions about America’s longest war to date: we wouldn’t be in the current mess in Afghanistan “if only [the Bush administration] had not been distracted by Iraq, or averted [its] eyes from the Taliban’s resurgence.” That’s almost certainly the case. But it turns out that without the Iraq war, the U.S. could well have found itself fighting in Afghanistan without NATO. It was the rapid U.S. advance across Iraq, particularly the fall of Baghdad, that turned […]

In a speech delivered yesterday to the national convention of the Disabled American Veterans, U.S. President Barack Obama reaffirmed his intentions to stick by his plan for withdrawing troops from Iraq. World Politics Review senior editor and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Richard Weitz, discusses Obama’s announcement, Baghdad’s readiness to take over operations in Iraq, and the possible ramifications for withdrawal in this CSPAN interview.