Reading Time: 3 minutes If you are keeping score at home, September was a bad month for the “Axis of Evil,” especially for its junior member in Damascus. In the middle of the month, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to New York to address the UN General Assembly and was invited to Columbia University, one of the US’s most…
Hillary could win
Reading Time: 4 minutes Hillary Clinton was the clear front-runner for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination even before Barack Obama’s series of foreign policy gaffes left voters wondering if the man who said he would bomb Pakistan was ready for the top job. So, what does matter in a presidential campaign? It is perhaps best to break the race…
Who is Barak Obama?
Reading Time: 3 minutes The 47 year-old junior senator from Illinois emerged as a powerful figure after he delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention while he was still a state legislator. A charismatic speaker whose half-African half-American heritage seem to represent the reality of multi-racial America and the future of the Democratic Party, Obama’s current ascendancy…
Gaza’s not the only battlefield
Reading Time: 3 minutes In most of Washington, the Palestinian civil war in Gaza hasbeen understood as yet another setback for the Bush WhiteHouse and yet another sign of an ascendant Iran. As if Washington policymakers vying for a job in the nextadministration didn’t already know it, Gaza is a sharpreminder that the peace process is dead. At this…
The after-neocon effect
Reading Time: 3 minutes Now that Paul Wolfowitz has been driven from his position atthe World Bank, insiders here in Washington concur thatAmerica’s neocon moment in the Middle East is officiallyover. So what does the future, and the 2008 presidentialelections, hold for American policy in the Middle East? Iraq. Recently, the Democratic-led Senate rejected a billdemanding the White House…
The so-called ‘peace process’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Here in Washington, the winners of the 2006 mid-termelections had just started to enjoy their spoils when the2008 presidential campaign already started to heat up. Nosooner had Nancy Pelosi finished her tour of the Hamadeyasouq than the Clinton campaign decided to make Syria part ofthe campaign platform. See, former President Bill Clinton used to say…
Bush understands Lebanon
Reading Time: 3 minutes The US’s former ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, recentlyconfirmed that Washington rejected calls for a ceasefirethis past summer and let Lebanon wither under Israeli attackfor several more weeks. An early cessation of hostilitieswould have been “dangerous and misguided,” said Bolton, whowas “damned proud of what we did.” So, maybe it’s worthwhileasking, with friends like…
The so-called Iranian threat
Reading Time: 4 minutes According to a recent Zogby poll, George W. Bush jumped ahead of Ariel Sharon this year as the world leader Arabs like least. Perhaps Bush owes his remarkable surge to the fact that the former prime minister was in a coma for all but two weeks of 2006. This same poll that surveyed respondents on…
Even big powers want friends
Reading Time: 3 minutes A friend at the State Department relates a meeting he had recently with a high-level official from a one-time Soviet satellite state, one in fact where the US waged a major, and very unsuccessful, war. But with the Cold War over and the US having won it, this nation, like most others, wants a deal…
Bush’s Middle East mission
Reading Time: 4 minutes As every upper level manager knows, you bring the consultants in to buy you some peace and quiet with the shareholders while you’re deciding whether the buy-out clause in your contract turns out to be more lucrative than the year-end bonus. So why did George W. Bush, the Harvard Business School-educated CEO of the United…
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