Policy Analysis

Over the last two years, thousands of Iraqi detainees have been released from prisons in compliance with Iraq's 2008 general amnesty law and the U.S.-Iraq Security Agreement that was enforced in January 2009. Following the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraqi cities in June, and the upsurge in violence

On Saturday, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri traveled to Damascus for a meeting with Syrian president Bashar Asad, the man widely believed to have ordered the assassination of his father, former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri. The 2005 murder sparked the Cedar Revolution, a mass protest movement that resulted in the

A new opportunity is now emerging for the "Green Movement" in Iran to demonstrate opposition to the Islamic Republic and the manipulated presidential election results earlier this year. Friday, December 18, marks the beginning of the months of Muharram and Safar in the Islamic lunar calendar. For the regime in

New data from credible private polls of the Egyptian and the urban Saudi public show strikingly high levels of support -- especially among Saudis -- for tough action against Iran's nuclear program. At the same time, these findings demonstrate clearly that economic concerns, rather than foreign policy or domestic political

In a speech in Washington, DC in August 2008, Ted Gistaro, then the United States national intelligence officer for transnational threats, painted a picture of a resurgent Al-Qaeda core, with an increasingly secure safe-haven in Pakistan's tribal areas. Al-Qaeda had, in Gistaro's view, "maintained or strengthened key elements of its

Late on December 11, Crown Prince Sultan arrived home to Saudi Arabia after a year's absence that included medical treatment in the United States and a nine-month convalescence at his palace in Morocco. Although described as "enjoying full health" and looking animated, Sultan is believed to still be unwell. In

A different version of this column originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. What is an Islamist foreign policy, exactly? Is it identifying with Muslims and their suffering, or is it identifying with anti-Western regimes even at the cost of Muslims' best interests? Turkey's foreign policy under the Justice and

FEATURING Dan Meridor, Ataollah Mohajerani, Aharon Farkash, Jackson Diehl, Michael Mandelbaum, Hossein Bastani, Khalil Shikaki, Mortimer Zuckerman, Ronald Neumann, Charles Wald, and many other distinguished speakers The Proceedings In June 2009, President Barack Obama traveled to Cairo to deliver a speech outlining what he hoped would mark a "new beginning"

On December 14, Lebanese president Michel Sulaiman is scheduled to meet with President Barack Obama at the White House. It is widely anticipated that during his visit, Sulaiman will request administration support for an increase in U.S. military assistance. Despite concerns that U.S. materiel will leak to Hizballah, Washington will

During the 1960s, Egypt and Saudi Arabia fought an eight-year proxy war in Yemen so fierce that Egypt repeatedly deployed chemical weapons against its Saudi-backed adversaries, the Yemeni royalists. Fifty years on, the revolutionary ideology of Egypt's former president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, is a distant memory, and while Cairo and

On December 8, the United Nations Security Council will host its first-ever thematic debate on drug trafficking as a threat to international security. This focus is notable. U.S. officials are increasingly concerned with the evolving threat of drug trafficking, especially as terrorist organizations stake a bigger claim in this illegal

What is an Islamist foreign policy, exactly? Is it identifying with Muslims and their suffering, or is it identifying with anti-Western regimes even at the cost of Muslims' best interests? Turkey's foreign policy under the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, government demonstrates that far from protecting Muslims and their

On December 7, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet with US President Barack Obama in Washington. The meeting follows Obama's April visit to Turkey when he reached out to the Turks to realign Ankara with the US after the tumultuous years of the Bush administration. Despite Obama's efforts

On December 3, 2009, Dana Moss and Ronald Bruce St. John addressed a special Policy Forum luncheon at The Washington Institute to assess whether Tripoli's economic and political resurgence has been matched by domestic and foreign policy transformation. Dana Moss, Next Generation fellow at The Washington Institute, is the author

This PolicyWatch revisits some key points in the author's 2007 Washington Institute Policy Focus, Secularism and Foreign Policy in Turkey: New Elections, Troubling Trends. For more on this topic, please visit our Turkish Research Program page. On December 7, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit Washington to meet

Islamophobia is rising in the West because so many of us confuse Islam with Islamism. This confusion also inadvertently helps organizations like al-Qaeda. Not a day goes by that yet another publication or pundit uses the terms Islamic and Islamist interchangeably, not realizing that Islam is a religion and Islamism

Al Qaeda in Iraq may be down, but it is not out. Last month, jihadists likely linked to the group posing as Iraqi Army soldiers executed 13 members of a U.S.-allied Sunni tribe near Abu Ghraib. In August and October, al Qaeda suicide bombers targeted government buildings in Baghdad, killing

In October 2009, Turkey cancelled Israeli participation in longstanding trilateral military exercises and announced instead that it would conduct military training with Syria. To many, Ankara's decision came as a shock. Not only was Turkey (in 1949) the first Muslim majority country to recognize the Jewish state, Israel and Turkey

Late on November 25, just before the start of the Islamic Eid festival and, coincidentally, Thanksgiving in the United States, Dubai's flagship investment company Dubai World announced that it would be requesting a six-month delay on paying its debts. Within hours, Dubai's reputation was being rewritten, and its ambition to

The announcement of a moratorium on building in the settlements ends the first chapter of U.S.-Israel relations during the Obama era. There are lessons for all. The move by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly a bid to improve U.S.-Israel relations as much as it is an effort to restart