Policy Analysis

It's not often that William Safire and Al Jazeera agree but, in the last week, both have drawn explicit comparisons between the anti-Western anger rolling through central and southern Iraq and the relative calm of the Kurdish north. In Iraqi Kurdistan, Safire wrote Wednesday, "we can see success: Rival Kurdish

Faced with both the Muqtada al-Sadr uprising and intense fighting in Ramadi and Fallujah, Washington announced that it will hold the number of U.S. forces in Iraq at the current level of 134,000 by delaying plans to withdraw some troops during the current rotation. The announcement is a recognition that

In mid-April, President George W. Bush will be holding summit meetings with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. The heart of both meetings will likely contain discussions surrounding Sharon's plan for Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and from a symbolic four settlements in the West Bank. Advantages—and

Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon arrives in Washington on April 14 to present President George W. Bush with his plan for "unilateral disengagement" from the Gaza Strip. Details of the plan still need to be nailed down, while the fate of Sharon (facing the possibility of bribery charges) and that

Over the past week, Muqtada al-Sadr, a leading radical Shi'i cleric in Iraq, has begun to launch direct, violent challenges to the coalition's authority. After a relatively quiet period of organization and preparation, Sadr and his faction have emerged as an even more dangerous factor in an already unstable security

The next few days will be crucial. Yesterday saw the first armed confrontations between coalition forces and the gunmen who support the young Shia Muslim firebrand, Moqtada al-Sadr. Today the Americans are hitting back with Apache helicopters. The action is across the whole of the Shia south, the area that

The year 2004 will go down in the annals of history as the year when NATO met the Greater Middle East. In the Istanbul summit on June 28-29, NATO is planning to admit seven Eastern European countries, thereby extending its borders to the Caucasus and the Middle East. Over the

The successes and operational failures of Israel's security fence along the Gaza border in the mid-1990s offer lessons for efforts to secure the West Bank frontier.

On March 28, 2004, Turks voted in nationwide municipal elections for the mayors of more than 3,000 cities and towns, as well as administrative council members for all eighty-one Turkish provinces. Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) won an overwhelming victory, increasing its national standing. With 41.8 percent of

The attack that killed 185 Shi'a Muslims in Iraq during the religious festival of Ashura bore the hallmarks of operations planned by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to US Central Command. Matthew Levitt examines Zarqawi's role as a co-ordinator of diverse extremist networks in Iraq and beyond. According to General John

This book is available only in PDF format. Download a free PDF (10 MB). Due to a number of daunting obstacles, a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems out of reach for the foreseeable future. Longstanding mistrust and bitterness persist between the two peoples, and the upsurge in Palestinian

Shows the proximity of key Israeli population centers to the boundaries of the northern West Bank. From the 2004 Institute monograph A Defensible Fence: Fighting Terror and Enabling a Two-State Solution. Copyright 2004 The Washington Institute

Thirty months after the massive World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, al-Qaeda is a significantly different organization, thanks to the successful efforts of the U.S.-led war on terror. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the threat of "global jihad" posed by al-Qaeda has diminished just because the organization

President Bush will attend a trio of summits this June: the G-8 meetings, in Sea Island, Ga.; the EU-U.S. powwow in Dublin; and the NATO gathering in Istanbul. Bush is proposing that the centerpiece of these summits be the Greater Middle East Initiative, which he first mentioned in January's State

The Yemeni media recently reported that thousands of Iraqis who fled Saddam Husayn's brutal regime and have lived in Yemen for more than a decade are now thinking about returning home. Many of these individuals are encouraged by signs of new infrastructure and a recovering economy in Iraq. If and

On March 29, Arab heads of state will convene in Tunis for the sixteenth summit of the twenty-two-member Arab League. The two days of discussion and the summit's final communique will provide some indication of the seriousness with which Arab leaders intend to tackle the issue of internal reform. Background

Responding to the March 22, 2004, assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Palestinian prime minister said, "Yassin is known for his moderation and he was controlling the Hamas" from being more radical. Though frequently called the group's "moderate" leader, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin has been directly implicated

BOOK REVIEW Disarming Iraq By Hans Blix Pantheon, 285 pages, $34 Hans Blix has produced a straightforward, easy-to-read account of the UN's Iraq inspections and the crisis at the UN in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war. With its clear style and blunt but polite language, Disarming Iraq will

On March 28, Turks will go to the polls in nationwide local elections to vote for mayors and more than 90,000 council seats in 3,184 towns and cities. The outcome of these elections will not change the composition of Turkey's current Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, which came to

Egyptian officials and businessmen are visiting Israel this week to discuss the creation of Egyptian-Israeli qualified industrial zones (QIZs), which would give them free trade access to US markets. They seek to emulate Jordan's QIZ, the most successful example to date of US-Arab free trade. Indeed, these zones have given