Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of the World Politics Review Commentary Week in Review, in which we look back at the week’s opinion pages. The column will be posted every Saturday by noon. We bet on the obvious last week by predicting Iran would dominate this week’s international commentary and indeed, by week’s end, we’d taken our gambler’s share. The U.N.’s Aug. 31 deadline for Iran to stop uranium-enrichment or face sanctions unleashed a flood of ink onto the world’s English-language opinion pages. One of the more lucid assessments was made by Claudia Rosett, who observed in the [...]
As a fragile ceasefire teeters in Lebanon, a broad consensus among Western analysts has emerged with the view that the Islamic Republic of Iran is the main regional victor of the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Certainly the fact that Hezbollah survived Israel’s one-month assault has brought strategic and public relations dividends to Iran (and to a lesser extent Syria), given that the Islamic Republic is Hezbollah’s major financial and military backer. Yet what is the nature of this declared Iranian success and what are its implications? If Iran has enhanced its strategic viability and increased its regional popularity, then [...]
An article that was published in this space on Sept. 1, 2006, analyzing the late-August attacks in Istanbul, Marmaris and Antalya, Turkey, did not correctly report the likely origin of those attacks. Rather than “Islamic extremists,” as the piece had stated, the Kurdistan Liberation Hawks, reportedly an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party, claimed responsibility for the attacks. The Kurdistan Workers Party is a Kurdish nationalist and Marxist-Leninist group and has little in common with Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda. Because information about the origin of the attacks was reported prior to the publication of the story, World Politics Review [...]
