All Policy Analysis by J. Scott Carpenter

Nearly three months have passed since Iran's bloody crackdown on the mass protests over the controversial June 12 presidential election. The Obama administration, however, has yet to determine a strategy to support the first serious challenge to the regime since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Last week's statement by Iran's top

On August 18, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak travels to Washington for a White House meeting with President Barack Obama. The trip -- Mubarak's first visit to the United States in six years -- marks the culmination of a six-month effort by the Obama administration to hit the reset button with

On July 25, Iraqi Kurds go to the polls to vote in a joint parliamentary and presidential election. Although a heated competition in January produced massive change at the provincial level throughout the rest of Iraq, the electoral system produced by the incumbent Iraqi Kurdistan parliament prevents such sweeping changes

PolicyWatch #1522 is the first in a two-part series on President Obama's trip to Egypt on June 4 and focuses on the president's much-anticipated speech to the "Muslim world." Part two will examine the likely impact of the visit on U.S.-Egyptian relations. On June 4, President Barack Obama will give

U.S. and European observers believe that Israel's new government will seek peace with Damascus in an attempt to pry the Syrian regime away from Tehran. Pursuing the Syrian track would also give the Obama administration an outlet for its peacemaking energies, given the ongoing dysfunction of Palestinian politics. Syrian president

On February 5, Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) released preliminary results from last Saturday's provincial elections. With 90 percent of the votes tallied, Iraq's new political landscape and key trends are slowly emerging -- with some surprising results. By far the loudest message from Iraqi voters was that the

This week, after more than a year of anticipation, most of Iraq's governorates will hold provincial elections. The election process and its outcome will provide a strong indication of whether Iraq's democracy will continue to consolidate or begin to unravel. More worrisome than the elections, however, may be the frustrated

Conventional wisdom holds that the Bush administration's Freedom Agenda has made "democracy" a dirty word throughout the Middle East. It this really true? The Washington Institute brought together an array of Arab democrats -- from Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and the West Bank -- to ask them what

U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice has decided to skip the Forum for the Future in Abu Dhabi this weekend, a move that will deepen concerns surrounding the Bush administration's Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) Initiative. Although Deputy Secretary John Negroponte will attend the forum -- an annual

Download the complete proceedings. On September 20, 2008, J. Scott Carpenter, Mohamed Abdelbaky, Oussama Safa, Engi El-Haddad, and Nader Said addressed The Washington Institute's annual Weinberg Founders Conference. Mr. Carpenter is a Keston Family fellow at the Institute and director of its Project Fikra. Mr. Abdelbaky is foreign affairs editor

On August 2, renowned Egyptian activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim was convicted in absentia for "harming Egypt's reputation," and sentenced to two years in prison. His "crime" was asserting in the Washington Post that U.S. aid to Egypt be tightly linked to specific political and economic outcomes. During President Bush's first

Prior to President Bush's trip to the Middle East last week, many pundits expected him to focus little, if at all, on his longstanding "freedom agenda." Instead, he adopted a nuanced approach that managed to restate the key elements of his policy and to press, however gently, for further political