Lee Smith is a journalist and author specializing in Middle Eastern affairs, with particular focus on Syria, Lebanon, and the broader Arab world. He was a prolific senior writer and contributor to The Weekly Standard from 2005 to 2017, covering regional politics, sectarian dynamics, and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. He is also the author of 'The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations' and has written for numerous other publications.
The New York Times last week broke the story of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s long record of sexual harassment. Actresses including Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd came forward to detail Weinstein’s depredations, and so did former employees of the man who founded one of the most important…
With the Oct. 15 deadline for certifying to Congress that Iran is in compliance with the nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Donald Trump is set to deliver a speech next week regarding his intentions. According to a report this afternoon from Adam Kredo at the…
Election officials from the Kurdistan Regional Government announced Wednesay that last weekend’s referendum on independence passed, overwhelmingly. With a turnout of 72 percent of more than 4.5 million eligible voters, nearly 93 percent voted in favor of realizing the Iraqi Kurds’ longstanding…
The Trump White House has yet to roll out its much-anticipated, comprehensive, government-wide Iran policy review, but administration principals have met over the last few weeks to iron out details regarding the nuclear deal with Iran, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. On…
Saturday night’s middleweight fight between Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin perhaps exceeded expectations. The showdown pitting two of the sport’s top pound-for-pound fighters, the undefeated 35-year-old fighter from Kazakhstan known as Triple-G, and the man who is now, after Floyd…
Beirut
The Trump White House has yet to roll out its much-anticipated, comprehensive, government-wide Iran policy review, but administration principals have met over the last few weeks to iron out details regarding the nuclear deal with Iran, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. On…
Last month the Village Voice announced it was ending its print edition, a 62-year run of muckraking reporting, cultural criticism, opinion, advocacy, and opposition—opposition to authority, to anything, sometimes to everything. Founded in 1955, by Norman Mailer among others, the Voice was America’s…
"I think we gave the fans what they wanted to see," Floyd Mayweather said after his ten-round technical knockout of Conor McGregor Saturday night. Indeed the fight, pitting an undefeated boxer with 49 wins going into the bout, against a mixed martial artist who’d never boxed professionally,…
Floyd Mayweather says he’s in for the fight of his life with Irish mixed martial arts champion Conor McGregor in their much-anticipated Las Vegas bout on August 26. “He's a lot younger,” Mayweather told ESPN last week. “When you look at myself and Conor McGregor on paper, he's taller, has a longer…
Recently the New York Times ran an op-ed from a columnist for the Times of London lamenting the timing of the release of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.
Lawrence Osborne’s Beautiful Animals is the novel of the summer—which will outlast the season a long time. Well reviewed in the New York Times, and acclaimed by fellow novelist Lionel Shriver in the Washington Post as a “great book,” Beautiful Animals is the story of a great crime. It is an account…
New York Yankees’ rookie sensation Aaron Judge hit nearly four miles’ worth of homers Monday night in Miami to become Major League Baseball’s 2017 Home Run Derby champion. The 25-year old right fielder hit a total of 47 home runs, including 11 in the last round to beat Minnesota Twins’ third…
Yesterday I spoke with the painter Trevor Winkfield about his early years as an artist—and his first experience of surrealism as a young boy in post WWII Great Britain, studying heraldry. (You can read the first part of our interview here.)
The painter Trevor Winkfield was born in 1944 in Leeds, England, and moved in 1969 to New York City. There he became involved with writers, poets, and other painters from the New York School, including John Ashbery and James Schuyler. Winkfield’s paintings are in the collections of the Museum of…
Nathan Thrall is a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, where he focuses on the Arab-Israeli conflict. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, Thrall has also written for Commentary, which is to say he’s a writer who specializes in…
More than eight years after they finished the new Yankee Stadium, I still get confused when I climb out of the subway at 161st and River Ave. Whoa—where did it go? The lot that used to hold the ballpark is empty. The stadium, I forget every time I visit the Bronx, is across the street. It's like a…
"The fight is on," tweeted Conor McGregor, the Irish mixed martial arts fighter, Wednesday, confirming that he and Floyd Mayweather are squaring off Aug. 26 in Las Vegas. The 40-year-old Mayweather is coming out of retirement for a pay-per-view windfall that many believe may exceed the $250 million…
More than eight years after they finished the new Yankee Stadium, I still get confused when I climb out of the subway at 161st and River Ave. Whoa—where did it go? The lot that used to hold the ballpark is empty. The stadium, I forget every time I visit the Bronx, is across the street. It's like a…
The intra-Arab rift that has set Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt against Qatar is now in its second week. A feud that seemed to begin as a principled stand against Doha's support for terrorism—one flash point was Qatar's recent payment of nearly $1 billion to Iran and to…
Last week, several Arab states, including Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, put Qatar on notice. They removed their diplomats from Doha, closed airspace and ports to Qatari vessels, expelled Qatari nationals, and prohibited their own nationals from visiting the country.…
Last week, several Arab states, including Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, put Qatar on notice. They removed their diplomats from Doha, closed airspace and ports to Qatari vessels, expelled Qatari nationals, and prohibited their own nationals from visiting the country.…
Edward Said saved my life. And I don't mean that the work of the late American intellectual and Palestinian activist rescued me when I needed intellectual or emotional or moral sustenance. Sure, at one point in my political odyssey, Said's work was important to me. Even now, though my ideas about…
Edward Said saved my life. And I don't mean that the work of the late American intellectual and Palestinian activist rescued me when I needed intellectual or emotional or moral sustenance. Sure, at one point in my political odyssey, Said's work was important to me. Even now, though my ideas about…
Wallingford, Conn.
Wallingford, Conn.
Jean Stein, author and editor, took her own life earlier this week when she leapt from the balcony of her Upper East Side apartment. Friends described her as depressed. She was 83, and leaves behind her two daughters, Wendy vanden Heuvel, an actress and producer, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor…
Last week the Trump administration sent a letter to House speaker Paul Ryan to certify that the Islamic Republic of Iran is in compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump had called it the "worst deal…
Last week the Trump administration sent a letter to House speaker Paul Ryan to certify that the Islamic Republic of Iran is in compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump had called it the "worst deal…
Social media seethed with outrage earlier this week after the American president made a phone call to congratulate the head of a NATO member on an important vote. On Monday Donald Trump reached out to speak with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan about the referendum that exchanges Turkey's…
Up until opening day, I was wondering what to do with all the extra time that Major League Baseball’s new "Pace of Play" rules were supposed to free up. The commissioner's office and the rules committee wanted to move the game along faster, presumably to appeal to baseball fans with lots of other…
After the Trump administration's strike on the Shayrat airfield Thursday, lawmakers, analysts, and the press are asking if the White House has a next move. Certainly it was important to signal that the use of chemical weapons is something the United States could not tolerate. As President Trump…
Up until opening day, I was wondering what to do with all the extra time that Major League Baseball’s new "Pace of Play" rules were supposed to free up. The commissioner's office and the rules committee wanted to move the game along faster, presumably to appeal to baseball fans with lots of other…
"Degradation of ISIS is not the end goal," Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last week. In what appeared to be a criticism of the Obama White House's ineffective campaign against the Islamic State, the Trump administration's top diplomat insisted, "We must defeat ISIS." At a two-day summit…
Elliott Green's "Human Nature" is one of the early hits of the 2017 art scene. Showing at the Pierogi Gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (it closes March 26), Green's show won praise from critics across the spectrum, including the New York Times, and the more specialized art press. His…
"Degradation of ISIS is not the end goal,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last week. In what appeared to be a criticism of the Obama White House's ineffective campaign against the Islamic State, the Trump administration's top diplomat insisted, "We must defeat ISIS." At a two-day summit…
The recently released Lost in Florence is a movie about a young American man who, like the city's greatest poet, recognizes that he has fallen off the straight path and, now lost, must find his way again. Heartbroken and healing from an injury that derailed his professional football career, Eric…
Los Angeles
Michael Tolkin is one of America's greatest living novelists—and way too underappreciated, perhaps because of his successes in other genres. He's directed movies, including the 1991 film The Rapture, starring David Duchovny and Mimi Rogers; written screenplays, including The Player, based on his…
After going 3-0 in the first round of the World Baseball Classic, Israel moves on to the second round of pool play this weekend in Tokyo when it squares off against international powerhouse Cuba Saturday (10 p.m. EST). The other two teams in Pool E are the Netherlands, whom Israel defeated…
Founded in 1947, the Hudson Review is one of America's most esteemed literary journals. Three young men started the magazine, William Arrowsmith, a poet and translator, Joseph Bennett, and Frederick Morgan, a poet and the longtime editor of the Hudson Review, from 1948-1998, when he was succeeded…
Please see the editor's note at the bottom of this piece.
In the wake of national security adviser Michael Flynn's resignation Monday night, lawmakers from both parties are calling for an investigation into his and other Trump aides' possible ties to Russia. Flynn famously, and foolishly, accepted a paid trip to Moscow in 2015 to speak at a banquet for…
Since President Trump's election, American allies and other foreign policy observers have been curious to know how the new White House intends to resolve an apparent contradiction. How is it possible that Trump seems keen to make some sort of deal with Vladimir Putin while expressing belligerent…
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld a nationwide temporary injunction on President Trump's executive order relating to refugees and visas from seven Muslim-majority countries. The White House says it will not take the case to the Supreme Court, but is rather drafting a…
Since President Trump’s election, American allies and other foreign policy observers have been curious to know how the new White House intends to resolve an apparent contradiction. How is it possible that Trump seems keen to make some sort of deal with Vladimir Putin while expressing belligerent…
During a White House briefing Wednesday afternoon, spokesman Sean Spicer brought National Security Adviser Mike Flynn to the podium to deliver a prepared statement offering more detail on Iran's recent "destabilizing behavior" in the region.
The White House seems to be backing away from aspects of President Trump's executive order on immigration. Chief of staff Reince Priebus explained Sunday morning that green card holders from the seven countries specified in the order—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen—would not be…
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii, admitted to CNN that she met Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on her recent secret 4-day "fact-finding" trip to Damascus. "I did so because I felt that it's important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering," then…
John Brennan says he didn't leak the dossier that connected Donald Trump to Russia. As the outgoing CIA director told the Wall Street Journal, "First of all, this is not intelligence community information." Brennan noted, the Journal reported, "that the dossier had been circulating "many months"…
Nat Hentoff—columnist, music critic, jazz lover, civil libertarian, atheist, pro-life intellectual opposed to abortion and the death penalty—was prolific and productive up until the end of his life. He died last week of natural causes at the age of 91. He was so expansive in his interests and…
On Thursday, President Obama announced an end to the "wet foot, dry foot" policy that allowed most Cuban migrants who reach the United States to become legal permanent residents after one year.
Nat Hentoff—columnist, music critic, jazz lover, civil libertarian, atheist, pro-life intellectual opposed to abortion and the death penalty—was prolific and productive up until the end of his life. He died last week of natural causes at the age of 91. He was so expansive in his interests and…
In his first press conference since being elected president, Donald Trump thanked the media. He praised news outfits that didn't publish a story about a document that describes alleged Russian efforts to compromise him, even though many of those news organizations had the story for months and held…
The Obama chapter in American foreign policy ends like the climax of an action movie—with a fireball growing in the distance and filling the screen as a man in silhouette approaches in slow motion and then veers off camera. Barack Obama has set the Middle East on fire, and now it's spreading.
Is the CIA, or some part of it, angry with Donald Trump? Even before the president-elect perhaps unwisely insulted the agency by citing its failures to assess correctly the status of Saddam Hussein's WMD program, someone high up at the CIA seemed to have it in for the incoming commander-in-chief.
Reports Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies believe Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign to tilt the election in favor of Donald Trump have sown precisely the kind of confusion that American adversaries must have hoped for with their actions. In an effort to reach some sort of…
Upon the death of Fidel Castro last month, President Obama remarked, "History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him." The statement was cowardly in striving for judicious balance to describe the legacy of a dictator who jailed and…
Upon the death of Fidel Castro last month, President Obama remarked, “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him." The statement was cowardly in striving for judicious balance to describe the legacy of a dictator who jailed and…
I called my mother on her 80th birthday last month. My brothers and sister and I were emailing each other as we've done every birthday of hers since she died more than six years ago. One of them remarked, "You know her phone is still working, right? You can hear her voice on her outgoing message."
I called my mother on her 80th birthday last month. My brothers and sister and I were emailing each other as we’ve done every birthday of hers since she died more than six years ago. One of them remarked, "You know her phone is still working, right? You can hear her voice on her outgoing message."
Perhaps the most cheering aspect of our American democracy is the optimism meeting a new president and his administration. In two months, Donald Trump will move into the White House and bring with him a host of ideas and people to implement them in order to advance the interests of American…
Will President-elect Donald Trump crash the Iran deal on day one, as he said on the campaign trail? If so, Barack Obama's signature foreign policy initiative, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), will melt into air. Obama allies and Iran deal supporters at home and abroad are already…
Will President-elect Donald Trump crash the Iran deal on day one, as he said on the campaign trail? If so, Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy initiative, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), will melt into air. Obama allies and Iran deal supporters at home and abroad are already…
The election of Donald Trump signals bad news for the Iran nuclear deal, Barack Obama's signature foreign policy initiative. Calling it "the worst deal ever negotiated," the author of The Art of the Deal has threatened to tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on day one of his presidency.
Over the weekend, pictures of a Hezbollah parade in the Syrian city of Qusayr showed Hezbollah fighters using American-made M113 armored personnel carriers (APCs). If the vehicles were transferred by the Lebanese Armed Forces, a recipient of U.S. aid and equipment, to Hezbollah, as some analysts…
The election of Donald Trump signals bad news for the Iran nuclear deal, Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy initiative. Calling it "the worst deal ever negotiated," the author of The Art of the Deal has threatened to tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on day one of his presidency.
Martin Kramer is the founding president of Shalem College in Jerusalem, where he also chairs the department of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. He is the author of several books, including Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, and The War on Error: Israel, Islam,…
On October 31, the Lebanese parliament elected Michel Aoun president, ending a two-and-a-half-year stalemate during which the country had no head of state. The presidency is reserved for the country’s Maronite Christian sect, so Christians there are celebrating the election of the controversial…
Florence, Italy
The Cleveland Indians pitching staff was masterful Tuesday night, but they had an awful lot of help from the Cubs, who struck out 15 times. Starter Corey Kluber had nine in six innings, stud reliever Andrew Miller had three over two innings, and closer Cody Allen struck out the side in the ninth.
The World Series this year feels a little like Noah's Ark, or John Woo's Face Off—lots of stuff in twos. Like Theo and Terry. The Chicago Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein built the long suffering NL franchise into a winner, just like he did with the Boston Red Sox, which won the…
Over the weekend the Washington Post published a review of Jay Solomon's book, The Iran Wars, written by New York Times reporter Elaine Sciolino. That one of America's top three remaining newspapers assigned a review of a book written by a reporter from another of the big three (Solomon is a…
Olivier Roy is one of France's most distinguished scholars of Islam, and author of, among many other books, Globalized Islam, Holy Ignorance, and The Failure of Political Islam. Joint-chair of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and Political and Social Sciences department at the…
The Nobel Prize committee awarded Bob Dylan with the prize for literature Thursday, which will no doubt prove to be a controversial selection. The issue is not that Dylan is yet another obscure figure the committee named apparently to score political points, nor that he writes in a language little…
The next round of October baseball is underway Thursday afternoon with the Texas Rangers hosting the Toronto Blue Jays (the Boston Red Sox are in Cleveland to play the Indians Thursday), but for some people that's not enough. Instead of enjoying the baseball, some folks are sweating the…
Barack Obama wants options on Syria. "The president has asked all of the agencies to put forward options—some familiar, some new—that we are very actively reviewing," said Anthony Blinken, deputy secretary of state. But force is not an option, since according to the White House there is no military…
What a strange season. Tuesday night at Yankee Stadium a man intended to propose marriage to his girlfriend. But he fumbled the ring like a knuckleball, with no one knowing where the thing would end up. The whole section looked for it. Fans used their cell phones as flashlights, parents sent their…
Miami Marlins pitcher Jose Fernandez was killed in a boating accident Sunday morning. The 24-year-old right-hander was 16-8, with an ERA of 2.86, and he had the second-most strikeouts, 253 in 182.1 innings, in the major leagues. On Wednesday, he pitched 8 innings of shutout baseball against the…
Jerusalem
As we go to press, the White House has reportedly offered Iran a deal regarding its nuclear program, a framework agreement with details to be worked out in the coming months. However, even as the interim agreement is set to expire November 24, it seems the Iranians have not responded to the Obama…
As we go to press, the White House has reportedly offered Iran a deal regarding its nuclear program, a framework agreement with details to be worked out in the coming months. However, even as the interim agreement is set to expire November 24, it seems the Iranians have not responded to the Obama…
"Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth,” said Mike Tyson famously. Many choose to understand the former heavyweight champion's one-liner metaphorically, as an American rendition of the Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke's observation that no battle plan survives…
Uri Bar-Joseph is a professor of political science at the University of Haifa and a former intelligence analyst in the Israel Defense Forces. His just published book, The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel, is the remarkable story of how Cairo playboy Ashraf Marwan betrayed his father-in-law,…
Jay Solomon, one of America's top national security journalists, has covered Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Over the last few years, he has focused especially on Iran, its larger regional project, and U.S.-Iran relations, including the deal over the regime's nuclear program, also known as the…
It's always fun when you're winning. It seems like everything is going your way. If you're Nationals ace Max Scherzer going against the local rival Orioles, you get a groundball hit back at you on the mound and you field it between your legs. With your back facing the hitter. Here he is pulling off…
In an interview last week for his new book The Iran Wars, Jay Solomon of the Wall Street Journal told Andrea Mitchell that Iran in 2013 had threatened to pull out of nuclear talks if the United States hit Bashar al-Assad’s forces over the Syrian dictator's use of chemical weapons. The Obama…
The novelist Roger L. Simon is the author of, among other works, the Moses Wine crime novel series, and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for his screenplay of Enemies: A Love Story, the 1989 movie based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel. Simon was formerly the CEO of Pajama Media and now serves as…
In an article Monday in the New York Sun, Claudia Rosett may have found one of the missing links in the Obama administration's Iran ransom story.
Puerto Rico won its first Olympic gold medal Saturday when Monica Puig defeated Angelique Kerber to take the top prize in women's singles in tennis. Puerto Ricans on the island and off were ecstatic—like Hamilton author Lin-Manuel Miranda, who celebrated in a series of tweets—as Puig joined Puerto…
It can hardly be a coincidence that just as the emperor of Japan hinted at abdicating his throne this past weekend, the island nation’s greatest baseball player ascended to a kind of diamond royalty. Ichiro Suzuki, a 42-year-old outfielder with 16 major league seasons under his belt (Seattle…
A day after the deal with Iran over its nuclear program was implemented in January, the Obama administration paid $1.7 billion to Iran to settle an old Iranian claim (unfinished business from the 1970s). At the same time, the Islamic Republic released four Americans it held in prison. The timing…
Someone has played a rotten trick on the late Scoop Jackson. The legendary senator from the great state of Washington was a committed cold warrior who saw the Soviet Union for the evil empire it was, and until his death in 1983 used all his powers of persuasion to drag the McGovernized Democratic…
The American foreign policy community is up in arms because Donald Trump told the New York Times he is disdainful of NATO. They’re right to be upset, but where were they when Barack Obama helped put Russia on NATO's Turkish border with his Syria policy?
The coup against the Turkish government has reportedly been put down. It's almost a day after a faction of the Turkish military attempted to topple the government by closing bridges, sending tanks out in to the street, firing missiles at protestors from helicopters, and arresting a number of…
Thursday night NBC Nightly News aired Bill Neely's "exclusive" interview with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. As Neely later explained, he's been angling for an interview with Assad for 5 years, and finally it came through.
What a week for anniversaries! Thursday we'll be celebrating the first year of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It's Barack Obama's major foreign policy initiative, which ostensibly prevents Iran from a nuclear breakout, but in reality paves the way for the White House's realignment with the…
Last week the Associated Press announced that it will begin using automated writing for its coverage of minor league baseball. The AP has reported minor league game recaps before, but didn't have enough manpower for the full schedule, which comprises 142 ball clubs across 13 leagues. But now,…
Lawrence Osborne's 2014 novel The Ballad of a Small Player is a perfectly structured book about an English lawyer on the run who spends his life playing baccarat in Macau casinos and hits a streak of luck so remarkable that he nearly falls in love. It's something like a combination of a ghost story…
Paris
Last week, an internal State Department memo criticizing the administration's Syria policy was leaked to the press. Fifty-one American officials variously involved with Middle East policy signed a letter calling for military action against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. "A judicious use of…
If you’re in the Northeast, it's a pretty good day for a late-afternoon nap, and not just because of the daunting heat on this first day of summer. You're going to want to rest up so you can catch the match-up of the week tonight with a 10 p.m. EST first pitch, when the Los Angeles Dodgers host the…
Barack Obama is confused. After 49 people were murdered last week in a gay nightclub in Orlando, in the most deadly Islamist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, the president turned his wrath on domestic opponents.
Klaus Wivel is a reporter writing for the Danish weekly Weekendavisen. His book about Middle Eastern Christians, The Last Supper: The Plight of Christians in Arab Lands, was just published in the United States. Wivel sat down with me recently to discuss his book, the Christian community in the…
Will Smith was asked to serve as one of the pallbearers at Muhammad Ali's funeral Friday. Smith and Ali became close when the former portrayed the boxer in the 2001 biopic, Ali. It'd be worth asking if he was thinking of Ali when he made his most recent picture, Concussion, playing Bennet Omalu,…
With nearly a third of the schedule already over, baseball is rushing toward the long grind. It’s these three months, June, July, and August, where seasons are built or squandered, with September a berserkers' challenge to what's been earned here. Fans and scribes are right to romanticize the…
Thursday morning Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's political and media adviser, Bouthaina Shaaban, spoke via Skype to an audience at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Her webcast speech was part of an event hosted by an organization called the Global Alliance for Terminating al…
Last week pictures of Qassem Suleimani started to circulate on social media, which is always a pretty sure sign that an Iranian military campaign is about to kick off somewhere in the Middle East. And indeed not long after, Iranian-backed Shiite militias, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps units,…
You don't want to miss the long Memorial Day weekend's big matchup Sunday night, when Dodgers' ace Clayton Kershaw is scheduled to take the mound in Queens, N.Y. to duel with Mets' ageless wonder Bartolo Colon, aka "Big Sexy." Kershaw's coming off his third shutout of the year, a two-hitter against…
Guess who's not part of the White House's Iran deal "echo chamber"? Yep, Qassem Suleimani. The head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force thinks Iran and America aren't poised for realignment, but rather are at war. And Iran, he says, is thrashing the great Satan. "Iran relied on…
Yesterday, Texas Rangers’ pitcher Matt Bush hit Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Jose Bautista with a pitch. Running from first on a groundball to third, Bautista slid hard, late, and illegally into Rangers' second baseman Rougned Odor. The infielder threw wildly on the double play, but didn't miss…
Today Iranian foreign minister Mohamed Javad Zarif sent his condolences to Hezbollah general secretary Hassan Nasrallah on the day the party is burying Mustafa Badreddine. As one of Hezbollah’s top military commanders, Badreddine is believed to have played a role in the 1983 Marine barracks…
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the document that shaped the modern Middle East. Known officially as the Asia Minor Agreement, it was authored by the British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot. They were charged with the task of…
Man, Ben Rhodes had an excellent weekend. The 38-year-old Mets' fan who serves as President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications got to watch the press tear itself apart in rabid confusion, which proves one of his essential points—the U.S. media is a pile of…
It’s hardly any wonder that Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has a "mind meld" with his boss, the president. According to a David Samuels New York Times Magazine article to be published Sunday and already posted to the website, Rhodes, like Barack Obama, is contemptuous of "the American…
A man recently killed his friend for picking up the check at an Istanbul restaurant. Anyone who's familiar with the sport of Middle East check wrestling cannot be surprised. Dining companions can go at it for half an hour arguing over who gets to pay the check and thereby prove one's magnificent…
Thanks again, Rick Monday, forty years on! It was exactly four decades ago today, when playing centerfield for the Cubs Monday executed what many think of as one of the greatest plays in baseball history: He saved the American flag from being burned. Just as the bottom of the 4th inning was…
On the eve of President Obama’s final state visit to Saudi Arabia, 60 Minutes produced a story suggesting that 28 classified pages from the 9/11 Commission report point to direct Saudi government involvement in the attacks. There has been a lively debate over those pages since the report was first…
On the eve of President Obama’s final state visit to Saudi Arabia, 60 Minutes produced a story suggesting that 28 classified pages from the 9/11 Commission report point to direct Saudi government involvement in the attacks. There has been a lively debate over those pages since the report was first…
Yesterday Sen. Tom Cotton moved to block confirmation of an Obama nominee for an important post at the Department of Treasury. Adam Szubin was nominated last year to fill the position of Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Crimes, and when the Democratic Senator from Ohio Sherrod Brown…
Why is John Kerry eager to provide Iran with more economic benefits by publicly declaring the Iranians may actually deserve more relief? Why did the secretary of state tell Charlie Rose that the United States and Iran want the same thing when it comes to ending the war in Syria? Why does America’s…
Last week the mayor of London heaped praise on the president of Syria for liberating Palmyra, and thereby saving its prized antiquities from ISIS. In his column for the Telegraph, Boris Johnson wrote that he knows “Assad is a monster, a dictator. He barrel-bombs his own people. His jails are full…
Last week marked the fifth anniversary of what started as a peaceful uprising in Syria. A bunch of teenagers scrawled on a wall in their hometown of Deraa the slogan of the Arab spring: “The people," they wrote, "want to topple the regime."
They're not saying "Gooooose"—they're booing. Yes, baseball fans are booing Hall of Fame reliever Rich "Goose" Gossage for his crazy broadside on sports talk radio last week against the game he loves. He ripped ballplayers and management in what can only be considered a rearguard action in…
Last week, Iran tested ballistic missiles capable of striking American allies in the Middle East. As the Islamic Republic is eager to make clear, Israel is the primary target. The second launch featured the Qadr H, a precision-guided missile with a range of roughly 1,250 miles. The clerical regime…
Israel's defense minister Moshe Yaalon said Tuesday that Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons against civilians since the U.S.-Russia sponsored "cessation of hostilities" began. "The Syrians used military grade chemical weapons and lately have been using materials, chlorine, against civilians,…
No one really believes that the Syria truce scheduled to begin February 26—to bring a "cessation of hostilities" to the nearly five-year-old conflict—is going to hold. And nearly everyone, at home and abroad, agrees that the problem with the agreement John Kerry worked out with his Russian…
Lebanese media reports that the man who hit the late Christopher Hitchens in an altercation in Beirut in 2009 has been killed in Syria, fighting alongside forces allied with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Adonis Nasr, an information officer with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), often…
Istanbul
Istanbul
Istanbul
Even before Vice President Joe Biden met with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara last week, the Turks were displeased. The day before, Biden had granted interviews only to opposition media and slammed the government for stepping on freedom of speech. “That's not the kind of example that needs…
Istanbul
Istanbul
Early last Wednesday, Iran released the ten American sailors it had detained to coincide with President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night. The administration understood clearly that the Iranians were both trying to ruin Obama's victory lap and sending a message—on the eve of…
Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mike Piazza were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. With his first time on the ballot, Griffey made history, named on 437 of 440 ballots (99.3 percent)—which has baseball left fans wondering how three journalists whose expertise is clearly European Handball got into the…
The attacks on Saudi Arabia’s two diplomatic missions in Iran—which came in response to Riyadh's execution of a Saudi Shiite cleric—are perhaps best understood as yet another skirmish in the Islamic Republic's long war against the regional order and the international order, both underwritten by the…
On Monday, thousands of Iraqi Shiites took to the streets of Baghdad to protest Saudi Arabia's execution of Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr. "We demand that the government close the Saudi embassy, kick out the ambassador and boycott all Saudi products," said one protestor, a sentiment echoed by many.…
Saturday the French ambassador to the United States Gerard Araud downplayed the attacks on Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic facilities in Iran. Following the execution of controversial Saudi Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, Iranian mobs surely backed by the clerical regime set fire to the Saudi embassy in…
It was a great year for the Obama administration’s foreign policy . . . says the Obama administration. The State Department even created a new hashtag to celebrate the White House's annus mirabilis—#2015in5Words. "Protecting Arctic Climate and Communities" and "Protecting Health of Our Ocean" are…
"The United States and our partners are not seeking regime change in Syria," John Kerry said in Moscow this week. The announcement that the White House is fully in line with the position of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's Russian and Iranian sponsors caught some by surprise. Others argue that…
Ourzazate
Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz delivered a foreign policy speech that was meant to carve out a position between the interventionist and isolationist wings of the Republican party. Instead, the candidate for the Republican nomination for president of the United States showed that his ship of state would…
Marrakesh
Marrakesh
In his interview with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, New Jersey governor Chris Christie explains that the Obama administration has got it wrong. "Iran is a greater threat than ISIS. If you're prioritizing the threats, which a president has to do, then I think that Iran is a greater threat than…
In July the Obama administration and its European and Russian partners met with Iran in Vienna to sign the so-called nuclear deal. The general idea was to at least delay nuclear proliferation in an already volatile part of the world. No doubt the White House was hoping for much more—that the…
Sources in Beirut are confirming reports from various Middle East media outfits that Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ expeditionary unit, was wounded in the fighting in the Syrian city of Aleppo recently. Fighters from Hezbollah, according to sources close to…
Yesterday, members of Congress observed a moment of silence to commemorate casualties suffered by a community aligned with Bashar al-Assad in his exterminationist war against Syria’s Sunni Arab population. Last Thursday, two suicide bombers killed 46 people in Burj a-Burajneh, a Beirut neighborhood…
Since the terrorist attacks in Paris Friday that killed more than 120 people and injured hundreds more, world leaders from President Barack Obama to newly elected Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and from U.K. prime minister David Cameron to German chancellor Angela Merkel, have expressed…
Last week, the Obama White House moved to ensure Hezbollah’s ability to point 100,000 missiles at Israel. That’s not how they would describe it, of course. But it was the Obama administration—as U.S. officials are quietly letting on—and not Russia that invited Iran to participate in talks in Vienna…
On Thursday, Dusty Baker was introduced as the Washington Nationals' new manager. The 66-year-old former all-star outfielder was named manager of the year three times (1993, 1997, and 2000) with the San Francisco Giants (1993-2002), and then went on to lead the Chicago Cubs (2003-2006), and the…
Last week, Senate and House Democrats threw a party to celebrate the adoption day of Obama’s Iran deal. Ninety days after the White House signed the deal in Vienna, Obama directed the United States government to lift sanctions on Iran, the Democrats listened to a string ensemble in Washington, and…
The chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Rep. Michael McCaul (R., TX), is trying to get the White House to pay attention to what Iran is doing around the Middle East. Earlier in the week, McCaul wrote a letter to Obama arguing that the clerical regime “has demonstrated hostility…
Now that playoff baseball has returned with the onset of autumn, and baseball becomes more intense, more excellent, and more precious, I’m thinking again about Harvey Dorfman. Little known to most casual fans, he was one of the great men of baseball, for he taught his students and friends and all…
It will be some time before it’s clear whether the story of Ahmed Muhammad, aka “clock boy,” has a happy ending. After being arrested last month under suspicion of bringing a bomb disguised as a clock to his Texas high school, the 14-year-old won the world’s sympathy, a scholarship fund, gifts,…
Last week an Obama administration official bragged that the White House’s Syria policy is working out just as planned. Special envoy for Syria Michael Ratney said that the “Russians wouldn’t have to help [Bashar al-]Assad if we didn’t weaken him.”
Last night Major League Baseball’s chief baseball officer, Joe Torre announced that Dodgers infielder Chase Utley was suspended for game three and four of the National League Division Series. In the seventh inning of Saturday night’s game, Utley went hard into second base to break up a double play,…
The United States, President Obama said at the U.N. General Assembly last week, “worked with many nations in this assembly to prevent a third world war—by forging alliances with old adversaries.” Presumably, the president was not referring to his deeply flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,…
The United States, President Obama said at the U.N. General Assembly last week, “worked with many nations in this assembly to prevent a third world war—by forging alliances with old adversaries.” Presumably, the president was not referring to his deeply flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,…
Today, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed that Russia has violated Turkish airspace for a second time. On Saturday, a Russian plane crossed into Turkish airspace near the Syrian border, and in response the Turks scrambled two F-16s. In a subsequent incident, Ankara said that a…
The Washington Nationals ended the home campaign of their 2015 season on a high-note Monday with Max Scherzer taking a no-hitter into the 8th inning before giving up a single. Manager Matt Williams pulled Scherzer soon after, with the right-hander striking out ten and getting credit for the 5-1 win…
Even now with the Russians on the verge of combat operations in Syria, the White House still says it believes that they’re there to fight ISIS. John Kerry says that his Russian counterpart told him that the Russians are “only interested in fighting” the Islamic State. Other administration officials…
Baseball fans continue to pay their respects to Lawrence Peter Berra, aka “Yogi,” the legendary Yankees catcher, big league manager and coach, and homespun philosopher, who died Tuesday at age 90. “What I really liked about him is that he was such a stand-up guy,” one mourner standing outside the…
In his testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday, former CIA director (ret.) General David Petraeus argued that the Obama administration can and should be doing more in Syria. Petraeus proposed “the establishment of enclaves in Syria protected by coalition air power where a moderate Sunni force could be…
A photograph of a drowned 3-year-old boy washed up on a Turkish beach after his family failed to find refuge from the war in Syria seems to have finally gotten the world’s attention. The conflict has been an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe for more than four years. A quarter of a million are…
The White House seems to think that Vladimir Putin’s Syria policy is a blunder of the first order. Recently, the Russians have deployed combat planes, tanks, ships, engineers, technicians, as well as special forces units to help sustain Bashar al-Assad’s regime. But that’s a bad idea, President…
Last week the White House puffed its feathers when Barbara Mikulski became the 34th Democratic senator to come out in favor of the nuclear deal with Iran. Mikulski’s support ensures enough votes in Obama’s pocket to sustain a presidential veto on a resolution of disapproval, but it’s still not…
Over the weekend, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt argued that Syria may be “the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people…
Last Friday, I moderated a panel at Hudson Institute titled, “Why is Qassem Suleimani Smiling? The Iran Deal and Sanctions Relief for Terrorists.” (See video of the event here.) The panel’s focus was not speculative—for instance, how the regime might spend the signing bonus promised by the Joint…
Over the weekend, thousands of Lebanese took to the streets to protest against their country’s corrupt political culture. The immediate cause of their concern, and anger, is that the country’s garbage has not been collected for a month and has come to pose, as Lebanon’s health minister warned, a…
War, President Obama says, is the only alternative to his deal with Iran. But if the president’s overriding goal is to avoid bloody conflict, why is he arming the Middle East for a shootout that may lead to Armageddon?
A new Gallup poll shows that 55% of Americans disapprove of President Obama’s handling of Iran compared to 33% who approve. This seems to support other recent polls that show the public doesn’t like the administration’s Iran policy. A Quinnipiac poll shows that voters disapprove of the Iran nuclear…
It’s either the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, says President Obama, or it’s another Middle East war. Opponents of the Iran nuclear agreement argue that this is simply a scare tactic the White House is using to get Congress to sign off on a lousy deal.
President Obama has decided to double down on his claim that Iranian hardliners “are making common cause with the Republican caucus.” In an interview with Fareed Zakaria that aired on Sunday, Obama insisted, “What I said is absolutely true factually. The truth of the matter is, inside of Iran, the…
John Kerry is bullish on the Middle East. He believes that the Iran deal will make it possible for the White House and Tehran to tamp down wars in places like Syria and Yemen. And—who knows?—maybe even solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In his speech today at American University on the Iran nuclear arms deal, President Obama asked for critics to evaluate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on its own merits. “Unfortunately,” said Obama, “we're living through a time in American politics where every foreign policy decision is…
According to Iranian-based media, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif appeared on a panel today at Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations where he spoke about the nuclear agreement he negotiated with the P5+1 last month in Vienna. Zarif explained that the so-called snap-back sanctions…
When the secretary of state says, as John Kerry did last week in his Senate testimony, that the Obama White House is “guaranteeing” Iran won’t have the bomb, you can be sure that—well, you can be pretty confident that he doesn’t mean it. And that someday soon he’ll pretend he never said it.
Israeli media is reporting that an IAF strike on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights border killed several pro-Assad fighters today. One of them is believed to be Samir Kuntar. Many are hoping that it is.
At the end of an exchange between Sen. Tom Cotton and Gen. Martin Dempsey regarding the number of American servicemen killed by the Iranians, Cotton asks if Quds Force chief Qassem Suleimani was responsible for the explosively formed penetrators that took the lives of several hundred Americans.…
This week, the Wall Street Journal wrote that in a report to Capitol Hill last week, the Obama administration said “it was unlikely Iran would admit to having pursued a covert nuclear weapons program, and that such an acknowledgment wasn’t critical to verifying Iranian commitments in the future.”
The following is an excerpt from a fact sheet prepared by Omri Ceren of the Israel Project that explains the significance of the Obama administration’s latest concession to Tehran—the reported collapse on the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program.
It's not hard to figure out why the Obama administration is lashing out at critics of the deal it signed with Iran last week. The White House has been pretending it’s a nuclear deal but knows that it really isn’t. Everyone from the president to the secretary of state and his negotiating team is…
A fact sheet that Omri Ceren at the Israel Project prepared details why the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’s inspection and verification regime is unlikely to stop Iran from a nuclear breakout.
One of the new talking points for defenders of the Obama White House’s Iran deal is that lifting sanctions will hurt the regime’s hardliners, in particular the Revolutionary Guard. It may be true, the argument goes, that some of the $150 billion “signing bonus” in immediate sanctions relief will…
Vienna
According to the terms of the Iran deal announced in Vienna on Tuesday, U.N. Security Council sanctions regarding nuclear-related issues will be lifted on a number of entities and individuals—from Iranian banks to Lebanese assassins, like Anis Nacacche. The name that most sticks out is IRGC-Quds…
Omar Sharif died Friday at the age of 83. He starred in a number of major films, like “Doctor Zhivago,” and was a fixture in Hollywood and what used to be the Hollywood of the Middle East, Cairo. It was in Egypt where Sharif, born Michel Shalhoub to a Lebanese Christian family, first made his…
Vienna
Vienna
The Obama White House thinks that when it comes to the Iranian nuclear program, we ought to let bygones be bygones. What’s past is past, and now it’s time to focus on the future. Sure, the administration once thought it was a problem that the Iranians refused to disclose their past nuclear…
Vienna
A bipartisan group convened under the auspices of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy released a “Public Statement on U.S. Policy Toward the Iran Nuclear Negotiations.” The group—comprising former Obama administration officials like David Petraeus, Robert Einhorn, Dennis Ross, Gary…
In response to yesterday’s Bloomberg View report that Iran’s forces and the United States share bases in Iraq, Senator Tom Cotton has issued a strong statement against the administration’s partnership with the Islamic Republic.
A year ago the Islamic State first made headlines around the world by storming Mosul and conquering Iraq’s second-largest city. President Obama pledged to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the organization. Here we are a year later, and with ISIS now holding more territory—including other Iraqi…
Immediately after the Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship Tuesday night with a 105-97 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers, one of the commentators asked Golden State coach Steve Kerr who he was thinking about. “Lute Olson,” said Kerr, referring to the legendary University of Arizona…
A UN panel says that the White House and other Western governments have neglected to report Iranian violations of the sanctions regime.
Even the Obama administration acknowledges that Iran is up to a lot of mischief in the Middle East. Tehran is engaged in a sectarian conflict from Lebanon to Syria and Iraq that has recently come to include Yemen as another active front. However, the White House continues to insist, against all…
For the last several days, State Department spokesperson Marie Harf has been at pains to explain why Iran is not violating the interim nuclear agreement, or Joint Plan of Action. For the last few days, the Obama administration has been pushing back against a New York Times article published Monday…
A few days after the Floyd Mayweather versus Manny Pacquiao fight, the reviews are still coming in, and most are negative. Perhaps the harshest assessment is a class action suit filed against Pacquiao by boxing fans who are angry that the Filipino southpaw fought with an injured right shoulder and…
Early this week, PEN American Center named six new table hosts for its annual dinner on Tuesday, substituting for the six who opted out to protest the organization’s decision to present its “freedom of expression courage award” to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Nonetheless, an…
Last week, the Obama administration urged Saudi Arabia to halt its air campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who have wrested control of the Yemeni capital Sanaa. The White House’s professed concern was that Riyadh’s Operation Decisive Storm was killing too many civilians.…
''We've taken this action to make certain the Iranians have no illusions about the cost of irresponsible behavior,'' the president said. ''We aim to deter Iranian aggression, not provoke it,” he continued, warning Iran against further hostile actions in the strategically vital Persian Gulf. “'They…
Ever since it announced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran last month, the Obama administration has flooded the news media with technical details elaborating the many virtues of the proposed framework agreement. Indeed, the White House sent its energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, a…
One of the important pieces of news to come out of Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi’s visit to the White House Tuesday is that Iraq will be receiving delivery of F-16s. At Commentary, Max Boot asks if this is such a wise move, “Why Are We Giving F-16s to an Iranian-Infiltrated Government?”
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is going to cause big trouble for the Obama administration. In a speech today, Khamenei denounced the White House’s spin tactics—according to the rahbar, there is no nuclear deal. Counter to what the White House has been peddling since it announced the…
The Obama administration has been campaigning on behalf of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran since it was announced last week—even as the exact details of the proposed deal are still unclear. What we do know is that the JCPOA will turn Iran into a nuclear threshold state. Even Obama…
The Obama White House is enlisting all its allies to make its case for the bad nuclear deal with Iran that, say administration allies, is better than no deal. The alternative, they claim, is war. And to what purpose? Many nuclear experts, Middle East analysts, and journalists argue, after all, that…
Last week it was reported that the White House and Iran may be moving toward a deal over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. The proposed phased agreement, lasting 10-15 years, would initially attempt to freeze the program. But during the last years of the agreement, Iran would be allowed to…
Last week, outgoing chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces Benny Gantz told an American audience that it’s important the international community defeat both camps of regional extremists. The way Gantz sees it, on one side there are Sunni radicals, like the Islamic State, al Qaeda, the Muslim…
In his most recent weekly column, Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Matthew Continetti argues, “Our ISIS problem is a consequence of the American failure to respond effectively to our almost four-years-old Syrian problem.” Obama’s resolution seeking an authorization of military force and his…
Last week, the Obama administration succeeded in pressuring Democrats to insist there not be a vote on the Senate floor in support of the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2015 until after the March 24 deadline for negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear weapons program. Lacking the votes in the…
Don’t be confused by the Obama administration’s Iran policy, warns Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Doran on the Mosaic website. It may look like random ad-hocery, but writes Doran, “Obama does have a relatively concrete vision. When he arrived in Washington in 2006, he absorbed a set of…
Just as John Kerry was meeting with his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif in Geneva last week as part of the ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran announced it was building two new nuclear reactors in the Bushehr region. That’s perfectly okay, said the State Department, since…
U.S. Army Col. Joel Rayburn, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University, is a historian who served as an adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. He is also author of Iraq After America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance (Hoover Institution Press), a thorough account of what’s…
French authorities have reportedly indentified the three suspects in today’s massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices—Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality has not yet been identified, and two French nationals, Said Kouachi and his younger brother Cherif Kouachi. The French appear to have been well…
Last week’s announcement that the White House intends to restore normal diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba is part of Barack Obama’s larger project to overturn what he perceives to be wrongheaded, or at least outdated, foreign policies. From Obama’s perspective, the Cold War…
If Chris Hughes knew anything about journalism, he’d throw a big party in New York and another in Washington and the media wags now heaping abuse on him would be hailing him as the last of the Medicis. But the 31-year-old owner and editor in chief of the New Republic doesn’t know a damn thing about…
Bret Stephens is the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize winning foreign affairs columnist. He is also author of a new book, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming World Disorder, detailing the Obama administration’s foreign policy blunders. Recently I spoke with Stephens about…
Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies and a contributor to this magazine. He is also author of 11 books, including the recently published Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel.…
Mark Strand died today at the age of 80. The Montreal-born writer, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1990-1991, was also a brilliant translator. When I was a junior editor at Ecco Press in the late 80s, Strand used to visit the editor in chief,…
The deadline for the Joint Plan of Action ended it seems without a final agreement between the P5+1 and Iran over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. It’s not yet clear what happens next.
It's not clear when (or whether) the Obama White House will conclude a final agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. The extended deadline for the interim deal known as the Joint Plan of Action is set to expire November 24. And the president very much wants a deal that would cement his…
Yesterday Senate Republicans, led by Lindsey Graham and Bob Corker, tried to force a vote on the Iran Nuclear Negotiations Act of 2014, which would re-impose sanctions on Iran waived during the negotiating process if the P5+1 fail to sign a deal by the November 24 deadline.
State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki’s sparring with reporters the last week suggests that the White House is either confused, or intentionally confusing the public, about the importance of the IAEA’s current round of inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities.
Last winter, my father gave me an American flag he had been keeping in his closet. It had been moved there several decades before from his mother’s closet, where it had rested for more than 30 years. It seems I was the first person to unfold the 48-star-spangled banner since it had covered the…
Last week, the Obama White House finally clarified its Middle East policy. It’s détente with Iran and a cold war with Israel.
Gregg Ritchie, head coach at George Washington University, says that the Royals have more of their game-changers going into tonight’s game than the Giants do. With pitching, as my former GW teammate explains, the two clubs are basically even. Royals’ starter Jeremy Guthrie and his Giants…
The fact that the Royals and the Giants have pushed the World Series to a game seven is evidence the two clubs are very evenly matched. Even tonight’s probable starters, Tim Hudson for the Giants and Jeremy Guthrie for the Royals, are similar style pitchers. Top velocity for both is around 90-92…
Last week Gregg Ritchie, head baseball coach at George Washington University, was talking about what happens when a baseball team strikes out more than seven times in a game. The more you whiff the less chance you have of winning, explained Ritchie. Sunday night’s game showed just how accurate that…
Now with the Royals tying the World Series Wednesday night 1-1, things are really getting hot: Two San Francisco radio stations have removed the song “Royals” from their play lists. The smash hit from the seventeen-year-old Kiwi songbird Lorde was inspired by a 1976 photo of Royals’ hall-of-fame…
During his visit to Washington this week, Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya'alon has spent part of his time criticizing Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, warning about the dangers of a bad nuclear deal with Iran—and highlighting the problems with Turkey.
With the World Series opening tonight in Kansas City, the Giants are no doubt feeling their oats. They’re coming off of a three-homerun performance in their game five win over the St. Louis Cardinals, which landed them their third World Series appearance in five years. However, the Giants should be…
Don’t be surprised if the Giants-Royals World Series is decided by 90 feet. After all, baseball is a series of contests for 90 feet—the distance from home to first, first to second, second to third, and third to home again. The two teams are bidding for the same property for nine innings, both when…
The Kansas City Royals are hot. With eight straight wins in the postseason, the Royals have the air of a team of destiny. The reality of course is much less magical. The Kansas City club moved on to the World Series for the first time in 29 years not because of divine intervention but because…
Last week Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the U.N. General Assembly and the White House to warn against letting Iran become a nuclear threshold state. He may be too late. With the Obama administration walking back its longstanding demand that Iran dismantle its centrifuges, the…
Experts continue to debate whether the explosion at an Iranian military base at Parchin earlier in the week was an act of sabotage.
Satellite photographs released yesterday show that the explosion Monday at an Iranian military base at Parchin, where the clerical regime is believed to be working on its nuclear weapons program, did significant damage. The images obtained by Israeli media outlet Israel Defense and “analyzed by…
There is likely much gnashing of teeth in the intelligence community today in the wake of Obama’s interview with 60 Minutes last night. He laid the blame for the rise of the Islamic State at the feet of the intelligence community. “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has…
On Friday Colin Kahl was named Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser and deputy assistant to the president. Kahl previously served in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East between 2009-2011, but is probably best known for his work…
Colin Kahl has just been named Vice President Joseph Biden's national security adviser. Kahl previously served in the Obama administration at the Department of Defense, and left in December 2011 when he moved to the Center for New American Security.
In the wake of President Obama’s speech yesterday at the U.N. General Assembly, there were reports of another chemical weapons attack near Damascus launched by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. If true, Assad is just drawing the logical conclusion from the president’s speech and the administration’s…
Last week, Senator Ted Cruz helped unmask an organization ostensibly founded to protect a Middle East minority. When the Texas legislator, the keynote speaker, asked the gala dinner audience comprising mostly Middle Eastern Christians at the In Defense of Christians conference in Washington to…
The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the terrorist army many thousand strong now rampaging through the Levant, embraces such an extreme, violent ideology that it makes even al Qaeda squeamish, argue many Western experts. On this reading, al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri was forced to distance…
During the six weeks of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, Hamas has used human shields—women and children—to protect its infrastructure in Gaza. This tactic is meant either to deter Israel from striking at the rockets, attack tunnels, and terrorists that threaten it, or—and for Hamas this is much…
The Islamic State’s official media arm, Furqan Media, has just released a video showing the beheading of American photojournalist James Wright Foley. The terrorist organization claims that the murder of an American citizen who went missing in Syria in 2012 comes as a warning to the White House to…
Yesterday Pope Francis endorsed military action to stop the Islamic State (formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) from persecuting religious minorities, especially Christians and Yazidis, in Iraq. The pope’s statement is to be welcomed—albeit with serious reservations.
Now into its second day, the 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian factions continues to hold. With Hamas’ missile arsenal depleted by roughly 50 percent and, according to Israeli assessments, 32 attack tunnels destroyed, Israeli officials are claiming a clear victory. “The…
During the first two weeks of the Gaza conflict, Hamas landed at least two significant punches. In firing missiles at Ben Gurion Airport, Hamas convinced the Federal Aviation Authority and European air carriers to temporarily suspend flights to Israel. The fact that relatively primitive rockets…
Ninety minutes into the 72-hour unconditional ceasefire announced this morning, Hamas launched a suicide attack in which two IDF soldiers were killed and another was kidnapped. Word on the ground in Israel is that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, rather than Hamas, may be responsible for the operation.…
Last week, Hamas fired hundreds of rockets and missiles at targets throughout Israel, including the nuclear reactor at Dimona. Two of the three M-75 missiles targeting Dimona missed the mark entirely, but one had to be brought down by Iron Dome, Israel’s antimissile shield. The U.N. considers an…
Hardly a day passes that I don’t think it’s a good time to go back and reread Fouad Ajami. As events unfold in the Middle East, he always offers some insight or information, or better yet one perfect and memorable sentence or phrase, that points at an answer to the whole puzzle. And now I want to…
Former head of the Shin Bet Avi Dichter joins former military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin and others insisting that Operation Preventive Edge can't be merely tactical. Rather, writes Dichter, Israel must uproot Gaza's terrorist infrastructure, not only smuggling tunnels but also munitions…
Qassem Suleimani is apparently the most interesting man in the world. To judge by the profiles in major Western media outlets—including the New Yorker, BBC, and the Guardian—the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ external operations unit, the Quds Force, is the most feared and…
Why were the words of Fouad Ajami “never welcomed in the cultural salons of Beirut and Cairo?” asks Samuel Tadros in Tablet magazine. And why are they now “unfashionable … in the halls of power in Washington?” Because “instead of following the herd and blaming the ills of the region on the…
Recently at a funeral for a catcher dead too young at the age of 55, his college teammates recalled his showboating antics. One game, they recalled, the catcher homered his first time up. Watching the ball sail off into the distance, he tossed the bat away dramatically, embarked on an emphatic…
Last month the president of the Syrian Opposition Coalition went to the White House. Ahmad Jarba and the Syrian rebels want American weapons, in particular the shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles that might neutralize Bashar al-Assad’s air force and stop it from dropping barrel bombs loaded…
At Tablet, French writer Marc Weitzmann explains what is behind the attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels on Saturday that killed a visiting Israeli couple, a French volunteer at the museum, and a Belgian museum employee. Weitzmann is a well-known novelist, literary critic, screenwriter, and…
George Clooney’s reps have yet to make the official announcement, but all the tabloids and gossip sheets are reporting that the Hollywood heartthrob recently popped the question to his girlfriend of less than a year, Amal Alamuddin. The 36-year-old Beirut-born and London-based human rights lawyer…
While the encomia from world leaders and cultural figures continue to pour in after the death of Gabriel García Márquez at the age of 87 last month, a Charles Lane column in the Washington Post last week on the 1982 Nobel Prize-winning novelist threatened to reopen a 40-year-old wound. Lane…
Over at Powerline, Paul Mirengoff asks, “Who was that cranky old man and why did he ice Kevin Durant?” That “cranky old man” would be Joey Crawford, the 62-year-old referee who grabbed the ball and ran over to the scorers’ table Tuesday night after Durant hit his first free throw with 27 seconds…
The Bryce Harper-Mike Trout showdown is underway and the outcome is, well, inconclusive. In round one Monday night, the Nationals leftfielder walked and went hitless in three at bats while the Anaheim Angels centerfielder went 2 for 5. On Tuesday, Harper took another collar going 0 for 4 as Trout…
Monday the Syrian regime announced that presidential elections will be held June 3. The State Department dismissed the news. “The fact that you would even think you can hold free and fair elections in the middle of a civil war,” said a State Department spokesman, “is absurd.”
The literary and intellectual world was up in arms last week with the publication in Germany of Martin Heidegger’s private philosophical notebooks. The first three volumes of the diaries, from the years 1931-1941, bring conclusive evidence that the man who is arguably the greatest philosopher of…
In Mosaic Magazine, Walter Laqueur reviews the recently published Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Laqueur tries to explain how a German writer (literary critic, essayist, philosopher) virtually unknown in his own day (1892-1940) has become one of the…
Last week the Israeli Air Force bombed Syrian military and security positions in retaliation for an operation on the Syrian-Israeli border in the Golan Heights. Four Israeli soldiers were wounded when Hezbollah attacked their Jeep. Hezbollah it seems was looking to kidnap them. This time they…
Yesterday, President Obama explained that while “Russia’s actions are a problem,” it’s not really that big a concern. “They don’t pose the No. 1 national security threat to the United States,” said Obama. Russia, the president continued, is a “regional power that is threatening some of its…
President Obama has made nuclear nonproliferation one of his highest priorities but, as the Wall Street Journal explains, the White House’s weak response on Ukraine is sending all the wrong messages.
From his place on the podium at AIPAC’s annual policy conference last week, Benjamin Netanyahu surveyed the Middle East. “On the one side stands Israel, animated by the values we cherish,” said the Israeli prime minister. And on the other side are Iran, Bashar al-Assad, and Hezbollah—“the forces of…
Today marks the third anniversary of the beginning of the Syrian rebellion, a popular uprising that started as a protest movement and degenerated into a civil war that has already claimed more than 146,000 lives. As the White House has come to enumerate the various reasons why it has balked at…
If Israel believed that exposing an Iranian arms transfer to terrorists in Gaza was a public relations coup that might make the White House think twice about making a deal with the regime in Tehran over its nuclear weapons program, then Jerusalem has fundamentally misread the Obama administration.…
Who’s surprised that the Obama administration, evolved, urbane and forward-looking, is having a hard time dealing with Vladimir Putin’s unreconstructed Cold War mentality in Ukraine? “We’re hoping that Russia will not see this as sort of a continuation of the Cold War," John Kerry said last week. …
Earlier this morning Israeli commandos boarded an Iranian vessel in the Red Sea carrying an arms shipment destined for Gaza and the Sinai. According to Reuters, the Panamanian-flagged cargo vessel Klos C was boarded in international waters without resistance from its 17-strong crew, who may have…
The economic news from Tehran is good—good, that is, if you are a state sponsor of terror moving toward a nuclear weapons program. If on the other hand you were hoping that sanctions might persuade the Iranians to cease and desist, the news is disastrous.
Russian president Vladimir Putin is everywhere. The former KGB officer has used virtually everything at hand to catapult himself as well as his country, the shell of a once mighty empire, on to the world stage. Whether it’s Putin’s determination to host the Winter Olympics in a semi-tropical…
Two weeks ago the Treasury Department sanctioned a senior al Qaeda official, Olimzhon Adkhamovich Sadikov, also known as Jafar al-Uzbeki, for facilitating the flow of foreign fighters into Syria. The Levant appears to be ground zero in a struggle between al Qaeda and an Iranian-led axis of terror…
Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, has just published a very timely book— especially for anyone interested in the likely success of the Obama administration’s diplomatic engagement with Iran. Dancing with the…
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited an IDF base on the Golan Heights that treats wounded Syrian civilians who safely made their way across the border. Netanyahu visited the wounded and then later, surrounded by IDF doctors, nurses and soldiers, addressed the press in this…
Yesterday, in front of a Presidents’ Day crowd at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, House majority leader Eric Cantor unloaded one of the most comprehensive critiques to date of the Obama White House’s foreign policy. “An America That Leads” hit all the salient points—from…
Lawrence Freedman’s post, “Iran, History, and Strategy by Analogy,” in the strategic and military affairs blog “War on the Rocks,” is a thorough and respectful engagement with Elliott Abrams’s recent article in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, “A Misleading Cold War Analogy: Don’t count on containing Iran.”
Over at the Washington Free Beacon today, Adam Kredo’s report confirms what THE WEEKLY STANDARD has been reporting since the November meeting in Geneva where the P5+1 came to an interim agreement with Iran over its nuclear program: the sanctions relief that the Obama White House offered was…
Six years ago Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated when the headrest in his car was detonated in Damascus. While Israeli intelligence neither denies nor confirms its involvement, the Mossad is generally believed to have been responsible for his death. And yet there is no shortage of…
Gossip in Jerusalem suggests that many Israelis misunderstand John Kerry’s obsession with the peace process: They believe that the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate is using Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as a platform to challenge Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination. That’s not likely.…
It was hardly a surprise when last week’s much-anticipated Geneva II conference bringing representatives of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime together with opposition members came up empty. Nor was it surprising that, as recent press reports show, the administration’s plan to rid Assad of his…
During Anwar Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem in 1977, he met Ariel Sharon, the Israeli general credited by his countrymen as one of the heroes of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Sharon’s crossing of the Sinai and his encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army had turned the tables on Sadat’s forces,…
The Middle East Media Research Institute translates a recent article by Saudi columnist Khalaf Al-Harbi, published in the Saudi government daily Okaz, arguing that the number of Arabs Ariel Sharon “killed is nowhere near that of those who died at the hands of Arab rulers, especially since the onset…
The Hague, Netherlands
“The Post-Sharon era began abruptly on January 5,” Peter Berkowitz wrote in a perceptive and far-seeing 2006 article for the Weekly Standard, describing how Sharon’s massive stroke affected the Israeli political spectrum and Israel’s standing in the region. Moreover, Sharon, wrote Berkowitz, “made…
The obituaries of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon touch on virtually every aspect and character trait—from the physical courage, military acumen, and political wisdom to the sense of humor, warmth, and prodigious appetite—of the nearly legendary statesman and soldier who died today at…
A car bomb detonated today in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold. So far, four are reported dead and over 50 have been injured. With rumors spreading that the bombing may have been the work of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, a Sunni jihadist group with ties to al Qaeda, it seems…
Two public opinion polls released last week show that the American public is skeptical of the Obama administration’s interim agreement with Iran concerning the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons program. Further, the surveys show that Americans by a large majority mistrust the mullahs and, as much…
A recent AP/GfK poll shows that a majority of Americans, 55 percent, disapprove of how Barack Obama is handling the Iran issue. There’s good reason for skepticism about Iranian intentions—after all, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif threatens that if the interim deal agreed to on November 24 in…
Over the weekend, Seymour Hersh published an article in the London Review of Books claiming that the Obama administration got it wrong regarding the August 21 chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. It wasn’t Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s forces that launched the attack.…
A new Pew Poll released today shows the American public does not support the White House’s interim deal over the Iranian nuclear program. Conducted by the Pew Research Center and USA TODAY two weeks after the November 24 agreement struck at Geneva between the P5+1 powers and Iran, the national…
The military option against the Iranian nuclear weapons program is still on the table: That’s the message President Obama wanted to leave listeners with Saturday at the annual Saban Forum, hosted by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Sure, Obama explained in his live…
Last week’s interim agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran over its nuclear weapons program offers the regime sanctions relief even as U.S. lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, are demanding more and stricter sanctions. The White House counters that more sanctions will only narrow diplomatic…
In the wake of the interim deal that the White House signed with Iran Saturday, Secretary of State John Kerry said on the Sunday talk shows that nothing has changed, not with the American position in the Middle East, or with the U.S. alliance system in the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin…
On November 20, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons program recommence in Geneva. The last round two weeks ago ended with egg on the Obama administration’s face after Secretary of State John Kerry failed to clear “bracketed text” with his own side in the talks. French foreign minister Laurent…
It’s Congress’s fault if there’s a war with Iran, says the White House. Last week administration officials showed their frustration with lawmakers who seek to impose another round of sanctions on the Iranians. "It is important to understand that if pursuing a resolution diplomatically is disallowed…
It’s not been a good week for Secretary of State John Kerry. Savaged in a Jackson Diehl column for his vision of a “Middle East dream world,” Kerry went from one miscue to another.
So the Obama administration is, after all, capable of tough, bull-necked diplomacy. These guys go for the jugular—for them diplomacy is a blood sport where anything is licit so long as victory is the endgame. Too bad the White House deploys those skills not against U.S. adversaries but against…
A recent spate of newspaper articles suggests a concerted media campaign targeting Turkey’s foreign intelligence service, the MIT, its director, Hakan Fidan, and almost surely his boss as well, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In a piece published by the Wall Street Journal and another by the…
Lou Reed died yesterday in Amagansett, N.Y., thus ending his life on the same island, Long Island, where it began more than 71 years ago in Kings County, better known as Brooklyn. For most of the time in between, Reed was all about Manhattan (he was, says this obituary in Spin Magazine, “the…
A long New York Times story today details the quarrels and vicissitudes that have marked the Obama White House’s Syria policy over the last two and a half years. Some senior officials wanted to arm the rebels to topple Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, while others pushed back.
Despite the administration’s hype of President Obama’s “historic” 15-minute phone call with the ostensibly moderate Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, the looming prospect of direct engagement with the regime in Tehran over its nuclear weapons program, and all the other symptoms of Rouhani fever…
David Samuels’ deeply reported oddball narratives and profiles have appeared on the covers of Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and other magazines. Samuels has also contributed two long interviews for Amazon’s new Kindle Singles series: The first with Israeli President Simon Peres, and his…
Blame it on Rouhani Fever. Earlier this week, Foreign Policy’s website reported that for the first time in decades an Iranian official used the word “Israel”—“not Zionist entity,” “not occupying regime”—to describe the Jewish state. Later acknowledging their story was wrong (“Death to Israel” after…
Since its July publication, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. has quickly become one of the most controversial novels of the year. The literary debut of author Adelle Waldman gives an account of the romantic and intellectual life of a young writer who, on the verge of publishing his first book, is…
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani didn’t have to snub Obama yesterday by choosing not to meet with him on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting. But, as with Vladimir Putin’s victory lap op-ed in the New York Times, Rouhani chose to rub Obama’s face in the dirt because he could. Obama…
Forty years ago this fall, the United States shipped more than 20,000 tons of tanks, artillery, weapons, and supplies to Israel to ensure its victory over two of the Soviet Union’s Arab clients, Syria and Egypt. Those airlifts showed the Arabs that despite their numerical superiority, they had no…
Of the 39 most awesome jobs in America, only the nine members of the Supreme Court have lifetime tenure. Major League Baseball’s 30 shortstops, on the other hand, are always looking over their shoulder. Every ground ball in the hole, every slow roller dribbling past the mound, every relay throw…
Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry went against received wisdom—and against the assessment of the White House he works for—when he argued that Syrian opposition forces are not dominated by Islamic extremists. “I just don’t agree that a majority are al Qaeda and the bad guys,” Kerry argued in…
Maybe Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin really did discuss the idea of putting Syrian chemical weapons under international control last week on the sidelines of the G20 conference. Putin sure doesn’t care that Obama’s taking credit for the proposal, or that the administration is posturing like a Mob…
Lost in the debate over responding to Bashar al-Assad’s use of nerve gas is the fact that the United States has other interests in the Syrian civil war, like mitigating the effects of the war on Syria’s neighbors—Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Israel—and countering the regional ambitions of…
The timing was probably not a coincidence, falling as it did on two anniversaries. August 18, 2011, was when President Obama first demanded Syrian president Bashar al-Assad step aside, and August 20 last year was when Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons would “change my calculus.” It was…
The week started with the White House seemingly determined to punish Syrian president Bashar al-Assad for his use of chemical weapons, but on Wednesday Obama let the air out of the ball. Last night on the PBS Newshour he explained he may yet choose not to pull the trigger. “I’ve not made a…
Lebanese authorities have arrested two suspects affiliated with a pro-Syrian regime group in the bombing of two Sunni mosques in Tripoli on Friday. Forty-seven people were killed in the attack in the northern Lebanese city, likely retaliation for a bombing the previous week in the southern suburbs…
Various sites are reporting that the CIA has finally come clean about its role in the 1953 coup that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadeq. Monday, on the sixtieth anniversary of the coup, the National Security Archive published on its website The Battle for Iran, a report prepared in…
According to the Wall Street Journal, Israel, along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, is gung-ho for the Egyptian army’s bloody campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood. This, the Journal reports, “has pulled Israel into ever-closer alignment with those Gulf states.” Yes, concurs, the…
Even with all eyes turned toward Egypt and the increasingly violent rifts pulling that society apart, the region’s active civil war in Syria burns on. Last Thursday, the two-and-a half-year-long conflict touched neighboring Lebanon, again, when a bomb detonated in the Hezbollah-held southern…
Earlier this week, Maurice Bonamigo had strong words for the White House on its Egypt policy. “The Obama administration failed to assess the situation in Egypt,” Bonamigo told Egypt’s flagship English-language media organ, the Egypt Independent. “It did not appreciate the power of the Egyptian…
This morning President Obama announced that he is cancelling this year’s joint military exercise with Egypt, Operation Bright Star. It’s a symbolic gesture intended to show that, should the army continue to pursue its present course, the White House may eventually decide to suspend military aid.…
Monday night, Alex Rodriguez singled in his first at-bat of the season—which for Rodriguez may end as early as Thursday, when Major League baseball intends to enforce its 211-game suspension of him that will include the remainder of the 2013 campaign and all of 2014. With the 12-time All-Star…
John Kerry says he can get an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement within nine months that would lead to an independent Palestinian state. That’s ambitious to be sure, but Kerry’s optimism raises a key question: With Syria torn by civil war, Egypt in the midst of a meltdown that may lead to another…
In assessing Egyptian defense minister Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi’s decision to remove President Mohamed Morsi from office July 3, there are two key points to keep in mind. The first concerns the army, and the second concerns what is now, given the escalation of violence over the last two weeks, its…
During hearings yesterday to reconfirm Gen. Martin Dempsey as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Sen. John McCain pushed Dempsey to find out where he stands on Syria. McCain noted that Dempsey supported arming the Syrian rebels in February and then changed his mind in April. "How do we account…
Since forcing Egypt’s first elected president from office two weeks ago, Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has become a folk hero. Popular songs praising the 58-year-old head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces fill the airwaves, while hagiographic portraits of the man who saved the…
On Tuesday, Egypt’s interim government named a new prime minister, Hazem el-Beblawi, an economist who served briefly as the interim military government’s finance minister after former president Hosni Mubarak was toppled in February 2011. Beblawi is a good choice, insofar as he seems to understand…
Two weeks ago, the Obama administration seemed to announce a major reversal of policy: In light of the American intelligence community’s finding, with a high level of confidence, that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against the opposition, the White House was going to arm…
The anniversary of the start of the last war between Israel and Lebanon is coming up on July 12, and it makes me wonder how Israel is doing. Not Israel the country, of course—it’s thriving seven years after fighting Hezbollah on its northern border for 34 days. I mean Israel the cat.
Two weeks of protests across Turkey that have left four dead and more than 5,000 injured have observers wondering whether Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing an Anatolian Spring. Is Turkey’s Islamic ruler weathering a crisis similar to the revolutionary climate that sent Arab protesters…
As if there isn't already enough on the agenda for the G-8 Summit, now Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is threatening Europe by hinting at a terror campaign on the continent. If the Europeans arm the Syrian rebels, Assad told the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "then Europe's backyard…
It’s not clear why much of the Western media continues to describe Iran’s newly elected president as a “moderate.” After all, Hassan Rouhani is a regime pillar: As an early follower of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Rouhani joined him in exile in Paris, and over…
Thursday the White House announced that the American intelligence community assesses, with a level of high confidence, that the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against the opposition multiple times, in a limited fashion. Now that it is clear Assad has crossed the…
The Obama administration is heralding a conference later this month in Geneva where representatives of Bashar al-Assad’s regime will ostensibly sit down with the Syrian rebel forces opposing them. The effect will be to prop up Assad. Sen. John McCain, on the other hand, is committed to the Syrian…
Post time for today’s running of the Belmont Stakes, the 145th running of the 1½ mile-long Grade 1 stakes race and final leg of the triple crown, is 6:36 p.m. With the Kentucky Derby won by Orb, the morning-line favorite in today’s race at 3-1, and Oxbow, going off this morning at 5-1, winning the…
For over a week now, the Syrian town of Qusayr in Homs Province has seen some of the heaviest fighting in the two-year conflict. The struggle for Qusayr, says besieged President Bashar al-Assad, “is the main battle” in all of Syria. Lying adjacent to a highway linking Homs to the north and Damascus…
On Monday, the Center for New American Security published an 84-page report, called “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran.” The subject matter is particularly noteworthy given the report’s provenance. CNAS is a think tank close to the Obama administration that, among…
In his joint press conference with David Cameron this morning, Barack Obama asserted that the reason Moscow doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the White House on Syria is because of the Cold War. “I don't think it’s any secret that there remains lingering suspicions between Russia and other members of the…
In his April 30 White House press conference, President Obama explained that there’s evidence chemical weapons have been used in Syria, but “we don’t know how they were used, when they were used, and who used them. We don’t have a chain of custody.”
Israel’s air campaign this past weekend, its two strikes Friday and Sunday on Syrian targets, shows where the Obama administration has gotten Syria wrong. Over the last few weeks, the White House has framed its Syria policy, or its lack of one, in terms of Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal…
Last week the White House celebrated the first anniversary of its Atrocities Prevention Board. At the time, Elie Wiesel asked at the inaugural ceremony whether or not we’d learned anything from the fact that “the greatest tragedy in history,” the Holocaust, “could have been prevented had the…
Jonathan Spyer explains how Syrian president Bashar al-Assad may have the upper hand right now in Syria’s two-year-old conflict. “Regime forces have clawed back areas of recent rebel advance,” Spyer writes in the Jerusalem Post. “The government side, evidently under Iranian tutelage, has showed an…
The Obama administration now believes that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad may have used chemical weapons. Today the White House released a letter explaining that the American “intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on…
During President Obama’s trip to Israel last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to apologize for the “operational mistakes” that in May 2010 led to the deaths of nine Turks who attacked Israeli commandoes after they boarded the…
Yesterday Syrian president Bashar al-Assad commemorated Syria’s independence day with a television interview where he described the Syrian civil war as a colonial plot. Western powers, said Assad, “never accepted the idea of other nations having their independence. They want those nations to submit…
Today NOW Lebanon publishes an article, with charts and graphics, explaining how the war in Syria pitting Sunni-majority rebels against Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawite regime has spread to Lebanon, affecting the delicate sectarian balance there. The fighting in Lebanon so far has been contained…
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, the husband and wife team of former U.S. officials (he was with the CIA and she was with the State Department) who’ve made a second career out of advocacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, have just published a book. Going to Tehran: Why the United States…
It’s still unclear whether chemical weapons were used earlier this week in attacks in Syria's Aleppo province, and if so who’s responsible—Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s troops or rebel forces. The U.N. is opening an investigation, as is the White House.
Today Sen. Marco Rubio introduced the Egypt Accountability and Democracy Amendment, legislation blocking “economic support funds and new foreign military financing” “unless economic reforms and human rights safeguards are adopted, while also initiating a more thorough, longer term reevaluation of…
Since Samuel Tadros first reported for THE WEEKLY STANDARD on prospective International Woman of Courage Award winner Samira Ibrahim’s anti-Semitic, pro-9/11 tweets Wednesday afternoon, some observers have argued that the State Department, as Jeffrey Goldberg writes, “narrowly averted a moral and…
Yesterday, THE WEEKLY STANDARD first reported that the State Department was about to bestow an International Woman of Courage Award on an anti-Semite and 9/11 fan. Egypt women’s rights activist Samira Ibrahim had left a record on her Twitter feed of statements quoting Hitler, celebrating the murder…
After meeting with Syrian opposition figures in Rome today, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the United States was sending $60 million in non-lethal aid to the opposition. That assistance, according to Kerry, “will strengthen the organizational capacity of the Syrian Opposition…
This week marks the second anniversary of the fall of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Two years after the refrain “the people want to topple the regime” filled Tahrir Square, it is now Egypt itself that is toppling. Street violence has pitted various groups against each other—anarchists against…
John Kerry is traveling to the Middle East and Europe later this month to unveil his new plan to get Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to step down. "I believe there are additional things that can be done to change his current perception," the new secretary of state said this week. "My goal is to…
Yesterday the Bulgarian government announced the results of its investigation into the July 18, 2012 bus bombing that killed 5 Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver in the city of Burgas. At least two members of what appears to have been a three-man team belong to Hezbollah. More…
One thing Hillary Clinton got right in her testimony before Congress last week: “When America is absent,” she said, “there are consequences.” But the administration she served has chosen to be absent, and we are seeing the consequences play out, from North Africa to the Levant, where the unchecked…
There are reports this morning that Israeli jets conducted a raid on the Syria-Lebanon border yesterday. On Tuesday, chief of military intelligence Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi was reportedly in Washington to speak with high-level American officials, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin…
Informed sources are confirming reports that there was a major explosion at a uranium enrichment plant at an Iranian nuclear facility in Fordow last week. However, the White House believes the reports are not credible and Iran denies that anything is amiss, but a variety of news items coming out of…
Last week, we learned of a secret State Department assessment that forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had recently used chemical weapons. The State Department cable, signed by the U.S. consul in Istanbul and based on interviews with doctors, defectors from the Syrian Army, and…
In December, the Obama administration acted on intelligence showing that Bashar al-Assad was preparing to use chemical weapons against his own people. Obama publicly warned the Syrian president and, according to the New York Times, “private messages sent to Assad and his military commanders through…
Last week THE WEEKLY STANDARD published my article, “Smugglers Galore: How Iran Arms its Proxies.” It seems that part of it may have found its way onto the reading list of Hezbollah general secretary Hassan Nasrallah.
An explosion in southern Lebanon last week destroyed what is believed to have been a Hezbollah weapons depot. This latest in a series of mysterious “accidents” in Hezbollah-controlled precincts proved, as one Israeli official wryly remarked, that those who “sleep with rockets and amass large…
NBC’s Middle East correspondent Richard Engel was released yesterday after being held for five days in Syria. When his kidnappers came to a rebel checkpoint, they were engaged in a firefight with a Free Syrian Army unit that allowed Engel and his colleagues to go free. NBC’s statement said he was…
This morning, the State Department designated former Lebanese parliament member, and longtime ally of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Michel Samaha as a specially designated global terrorist. Treasury also designated Samaha for “undermining Lebanon’s democratic processes or institutions,…
ABC’s White House correspondent, Jake Tapper, is known in some circles as a contentious or even difficult reporter. In others, he’s hailed as perhaps the most objective journalist covering the president, more willing than most of his colleagues to push Obama and his aides with questions that are…
Soon after 9/11, Michael Totten abandoned a profitable career as a technical writer and started a blog that took him throughout the Middle East, including Iraq which he visited seven times from 2006 to 2009. He also lived in Lebanon in parts of 2005 and 2006 in the middle of the Cedar Revolution,…
Two technology firms that monitor global Internet traffic report that Syria has been cut off from the Internet. Regular landline phone and cell phones services have been affected as well, Syrian opposition activist Ammar Abdulhamid told me. “Therefore, the possibility of accidental damage can be…
A week after the ceasefire concluding Israel’s eight day campaign against Hamas, Operation Pillar of Defense, there is some debate as to who came out on top. The way one judges the outcome seems to depend on: one, what you make of the ceasefire agreement; two, what role you think that Egyptian…
For almost a year, America’s allies in the Middle East and Western Europe have believed it was only Obama’s reelection campaign that held the president back from employing more forceful means to topple Bashar al-Assad. After all, ending the bloodshed that has killed over 40,000 people has been the…
Israel’s latest campaign in Gaza against Hamas has left Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in a bind. His rivals, both on the left and more significantly those on the right, the Salafis, have taken to the streets to protest Operation Pillar of Defense. Morsi has recalled Egypt’s ambassador to Israel,…
Earlier today, Israel struck at dozens of targets inside Gaza, including Ahmed Jabari, Hamas’s chief of staff and a senior official in the organization’s military outfit, the Izz ad-din al-Qassam Brigades. Jabari was behind the abduction of Gilad Shalit, and planned the 2007 coup that left Hamas in…
The Washington Post is reporting that an article published on the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence website suggests that Tehran is open to talks. According to the Post, the document is a “sober analysis assessing the possible threat of a military confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program and…
The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot is reporting that the Obama administration has been conducting one-on-one talks with its Iranian counterparts. Negotiations, according to the report, have been held in Bahrain and have been led by Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett.
A pro-Syrian government Facebook page, News Network of the Syrian Armed Forces, is reporting that the hurricane that touched down on the East Coast of the United States is not a natural catastrophe. Rather, it's the work of Syrian and Iranian scientists.
Yesterday a car bomb in Beirut killed a senior Lebanese security chief along with seven others, while wounding hundreds in Ashrafiyeh, a busy neighborhood in Christian-majority East Beirut. The target, Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hassan, was close to former prime minister Saad Hariri and his late father,…
It couldn’t look darker for the Yankees with the American League Championship Series on the line. Down two games to none, they head into Detroit tonight to face stopper Justin Verlander (17-8 record in the regular season and a 2.64 ERA). The Tigers’ ace breezed through the Oakland A’s in the first…
After almost a week of exchanging fire with Syrian troops across its southern border, Turkey finds itself embroiled on another, albeit related, international front. Wednesday the Turkish air force scrambled two jets to intercept a Syrian passenger jet flying from Moscow to Damascus. The plane, said…
Still basking in the glory of his latest appearance at the U.N., Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now heads back to Tehran with his head held high after winning yet more American hearts and minds. As the Islamic Republic's official news agency, Fars, reports this morning, according to a new…
It was bad enough, two years ago, that Defense Secretary Robert Gates called fringe Florida pastor Terry Jones to ask him not to burn copies of the Koran, or last week, that chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey took his turn to call Jones to ask him to stop publicizing a YouTube video,…
A large demonstration is planned for tomorrow, Friday, in front of the U.S. embassy in Cairo but, as you can see on Al Jazeera’s live streaming video, protesters are gathered today, too. The police have established their position at some distance from the crowd, as well as the embassy, and are…
Yesterday, on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an Egyptian mob stormed the U.S. embassy in Cairo, pulled down the American flag and burned it. In its place, they raised a black banner inscribed with the shehada ("There is no God but Allah, Mohamed is the messenger of Allah"), a pennant…
If Syria is a testing ground for the larger struggle of the American-led order in the Middle East against the Iranian-led resistance bloc, it’s also an example of the importance of the Kurds. An ethnic community with almost 30 million people spread across the Middle East—most densely in Turkey,…
Last week, Iran reportedly dispatched more of its Revolutionary Guard shock troops to Syria to prop up its ally. And with that the Obama administration lost another of its justifications for sitting by idly as Syrian president Bashar al-Assad runs his countrymen through a meat grinder. The death…
In Beirut last week, former Lebanese MP and cabinet member Michel Samaha was arrested and later confessed to “planning terrorist attacks in Lebanon at Syrian orders.” A longtime ally of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Samaha was apparently acting under the direction of Damascus to stir sectarian…
Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi’s housecleaning over the last two weeks—dismissing several top army officers and an intelligence chief and abrogating constitutional amendments limiting presidential power—has left observers trying to figure out the grand design behind Morsi’s actions. Some think…
Last week the Treasury Department leveled sanctions against Hezbollah for providing support to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in his efforts to put down the 17-month-old rebellion meant to topple his regime. Since Hezbollah has already been designated as a foreign terrorist organization, this…
To Hell in a Handbasket
The New York Times reports from Antakya, a Turkish town close to the Syrian border, that one of Turkey’s minority populations supports the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. “As Syria’s civil war degenerates into a bloody sectarian showdown between the government’s Alawite-dominated troops…
As we go to press, Bashar al-Assad seems to be losing Damascus, as he has lost much of the rest of the country. Reports last week suggested the Syrian president might already be in Latakia, the de facto capital of the Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean coast. But even if he has not already…
The only real escape from the oppressive heat of a New York summer is a night in the open air under the lights at a big-league ballpark. That’s what my brothers and I thought, anyway, growing up as we did spending a dozen or more evenings every year at Yankee Stadium. We cut coupons from milk…
In Damascus this morning a bomb at the National Security building killed several members of Bashar al-Assad’s “crisis cell” —a group of key regime figures tasked to put down the 16-month uprising against the Assad regime. Interior minister Mohammed al-Shaar and head of national security General…
Advocates of robust American action in Syria to help remove Bashar al-Assad from power have typically made two arguments. One is the humanitarian case, urging the Obama administration to prevent further bloodshed in what is now turning into a campaign of sectarian cleansing against Syria’s Sunni…
The Syrian regime has reportedly perpetrated another episode of sectarian cleansing. Yesterday, the army and paramilitary gangs loyal to president Bashar al-Assad killed more than 200 people in the Sunni village of Tremseh, in Hama province.
On Tuesday, Russia announced it was sending 11 warships to the Mediterranean—some of which would dock in Syria, where Moscow keeps a base in Tartus. If some onlookers believed that the “unusually large size of the force” was meant to send a message to Washington, the fact is, the Obama…
In this week's issue, Jeffrey Dressler explains that the Obama State Department has yet to designate the Haqqani network as a foreign terrorist organization, in spite of bipartisan pressure from lawmakers to do so. Led by the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein (D,…
During Major League Baseball’s All-Star game Home Run Derby last night, hometown Kansas City fans booed Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano with such gusto one could be forgiven for supposing there’s still a lively rivalry between the New York and Kansas City franchises—like there was back in the…
Human Rights Watch has just released an 81-page report detailing the Syrian regime’s systematic use of torture against opposition figures. “‘Torture Archipelago: Arbitrary Arrests, Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Syria’s Underground Prisons since March 2011’ is based on more than 200…
Egyptian state television is reporting that authorities are delaying announcement of the results of last week's presidential election.
The Justice Department has launched an investigation into the White House’s handling of classified information. The spur seems to have been the June 1 New York Times article by David Sanger, sourced to current and former U.S. officials, revealing sensitive details about the Stuxnet and Flame…
The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House is helping to coordinate logistics for the Free Syrian Army, but not providing arms. “U.S. intelligence operatives and diplomats have stepped up their contacts with Syrian rebels in part to help organize their burgeoning military operations…
While the Obama administration and its allies at the New York Times are waiting for Russia to intervene and get Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to step down, the children of Kafranbel show a clearer sense of strategic reality:
Hillary Clinton says that the Obama administration can’t do anything about Bashar al-Assad. They can’t make him step down, and they can’t stop him from massacring women and children, as he did last week in Houla. “The Syrians are not going to listen to us,” Clinton said last week. “They may listen,…
Senator John McCain’s floor statement on Syria today rightly focused on the Obama administration’s bizarre conviction that the Russians have the ability and perhaps even the desire to get Bashar al-Assad to step down.
Reports are circulating of another Syrian regime massacre yesterday in a small town near Hama, al-Qubayr. It appears that, as with the slaughter at Houla two weeks ago, more 100 were killed, including many women and children.
Some have argued that last week’s massacre in the Syrian city of Houla, where Bashar al-Assad loyalists killed more than a hundred people, a third of whom were children, may in time come to mark the moment when world opinion turned irrevocably against the Syrian strongman, and the democracies…
According to recent news reports, the Romney foreign policy team is trying to figure out what the presumptive Republican candidate thinks America’s role in the world should be. He’s been clear regarding the Iranian nuclear weapons program, promising that if he’s elected, Iran won’t get the bomb.…
Last Friday, a Lebanese military tribunal met for the fifth time in the trial of Sheikh Hassan Mchaymech, the Hezbollah dissident. The Shia cleric Mchaymech was first kidnapped in the summer of 2010 by Syrian security forces as he tried to cross the Lebanon-Syria border on his way to make a…
State Department officials have announced that Hillary Clinton is moving toward taking the Mujahedin e-Khalq, or MEK, off the list of foreign terrorist organizations. The secretary of state has already delayed her decision to review the MEK's status for almost two years, even though congressional…
Maarab, Lebanon
The Treasury Department has issued subpoenas to the speakers’ agencies of 11 prominent former U.S. officials, including a governor of Pennsylvania, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and director of Homeland Security, who have given speeches on behalf of the Mujahedin e-Khalq, or MEK.…
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion died earlier this week at the age 102. Today, over at Tablet, Yossi Klein Halevi and Jonathan Spyer have very interesting, informative takes on Bibi and his late father—as well as the history of Revisionist Zionism, its battles with Labor,…
Yesterday the Washington Post inexplicably published a piece about the Vogue profile of Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad—a profile published in March 2011. It’s inexplicable because it’s old news: Vogue removed the story, titled “A Rose in the Desert,” from its website long ago—and the fact that the…
An essay in the latest issue of Foreign Policy by Egyptian-born activist and journalist Mona Eltahawy, “Why Do They Hate Us? The real war on women is in the Middle East,” couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. Today Egypt’s new Islamist-dominated parliament drafted a law permitting men to…
Yesterday, the White House’s Atrocities Prevention Board held its first meeting. Chaired by NSC staffer Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, the board will “coordinate action across the entire government on stopping genocide and liaise with the NGO…
Here's video from Homs, documenting yet more violations of the Kofi Annan-brokered Syrian ceasefire that the Obama administration is celebrating:
Former U.N. chief Kofi Annan sought a ceasefire in Syria between forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the opposition. The Obama administration insists that the ceasefire is holding. "What we saw in the last day or so was a very fragile truce emerge, a very fragile first step," State…
Last week, the Obama administration started releasing the $1.3 billion in U.S. military assistance to Egypt that’s been on hold since October. Over the objections of human rights advocates and democracy activists, Hillary Clinton signed a waiver allowing Washington to circumvent recent legislation…
In an article today in NOW Lebanon, Tony Badran reports that Hillary Clinton “dismissed a number of forward leaning options on Syria” proposed by Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to the White House. “What this means,” writes Badran, “is that Washington, which at one point subcontracted its…
Journalist Nir Rosen defended himself against accusations over the weekend that he’d collaborated with Syrian security services. Rosen, who spent four months in Syria reporting for Al Jazeera International’s English-language website, was implicated in emails published by Al Arabiya. Along with the…
Here’s to John McCain, leading from the front. Last week, the Arizona senator cut through all the White House doubletalk on the Syrian uprising and demanded a more active U.S. policy, including provision of arms to the Free Syrian Army as well as airpower to slow the assaults of Bashar al-Assad’s…
Late last week Spanish authorities announced that they’re extraditing Egyptian businessman Hussein Salem, a close associate of former president Hosni Mubarak. Salem is a central figure in the post-Mubarak narrative of the regime’s rampant corruption. He has already been sentenced in absentia to…
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey testified today on Syria. It seems that a large part of the administration’s thinking concerning military intervention touches on the regime’s air defenses.
Maybe the murder of an American journalist in Syria last week will focus the American president’s mind. Marie Colvin was killed, along with a French photojournalist, when troops loyal to -President Bashar al-Assad shelled the opposition’s makeshift press center in Homs. This city on the western…
A number of recent articles make the case that the administration’s Syria policy is incoherent. Elliott Abrams says it’s worse than that: The White House’s position on Syria is duplicitous. Abrams looks at a series of recent interviews Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has given to the press about…
In Now Lebanon, Hussain Abdul Hussain writes about “the new Arab thinking.” It was not born overnight, explains the Washington-based Arab media correspondent:
In the fall of 2007 Israel reportedly hacked into Syria’s air defense systems and disabled them, as a prelude to bombing a nuclear facility in the Syrian desert. This vaunted cyber exploit, it turns out, might not merit its spectacular reputation. Last week, the shadowy online activist group known…
The Obama administration keeps spinning its wheels on Syria. Because the White House sees no clear American interest in toppling Bashar al-Assad, it has tasked out Syria policy to others, first Turkey then the Arab League, and pleads for an international chorus condemning the Syrian regime at the…
Last week, Syrian security forces withdrew from Zabadani, a town near Damascus where defectors from the army and other antiregime elements had been exchanging heavy fire with the army. In Lebanon, some democracy activists believe that an opposition victory in a major Syrian city will energize…
Beirut
Last week the Obama administration’s point man on Syria, Frederic Hof, went to Capitol Hill to apprise the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East of recent developments. Nine months into the uprising against a regime that has already killed 5,000 protesters, Bashar al-Assad, said…
This morning, the White House released a statement regarding further atrocities committed by the Syrian regime.
In February 2009, Christopher Hitchens got into a fight with fascists in Beirut. Visiting the country as part of a delegation of foreign journalists hosted by Lebanon’s pro-democracy March 14 movement, Hitchens was walking through the Hamra district with two colleagues when he saw a plaque…
Yesterday, a rocket fired from southern Lebanon missed its target in Israel. Instead it wounded a Lebanese woman, hinting at a possible pattern of things to come. While Hezbollah contends that its weapons are to protect Lebanon from Israel, the reality is that the arms used to defend the…
The storming of the British embassy in Tehran last week by the Islamic Republic’s Basij loyalists is evidence that fevered paranoia is now part of the Iranian regime’s decision-making process. In Washington, a confrontation between a Democratic senator and Obama administration officials over Iran…
Now that runoff results are in from the first round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections, it’s clear that the Islamists are running the board. As Samuel Tadros writes in the National Review, that includes not only the Muslim Brotherhood but also one faction of the Salafist Alliance that the State…
Tonight, ABC News will broadcast Barbara Walters’s interview with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The network hasn’t released the full transcript yet, but so far press releases suggest that the big news is that Assad is denying any responsibility for the almost 4,000 Syrians killed since the…
Earlier in the week Israel Hayom reported that the new Tunisian constitution may include “a section condemning Zionism and ruling out any friendly ties with Israel.” Yesterday Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of al-Nahda (Revival), the main Islamist party that won more than 40 percent of the seats in…
In the aftermath of a reported explosion earlier today in the Iranian city of Isfahan that may have targeted a uranium enrichment plant, at least three katyusha rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel's western Galilee overnight Monday. The Israel Defense Forces returned fire, and said it holds…
The Syrian opposition to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is gathering steam. Syrian soldiers, as Max Boot writes in this week's issue, "are defecting to the Free Syrian Army, which in recent days has reportedly attacked an intelligence headquarters outside of Damascus and a Baath party…
Despite the violence from street protests that left some 38 people dead over the last two weeks, Egyptians went to the polls today for the first round of parliamentary elections. As the website for the semi-official Egyptian daily Al-Ahram notes, there will be three rounds of elections for the…
Bashar al-Assad is finished. The Arab League has condemned him, as have former allies Qatar and Turkey. One time Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal says Assad’s exit is inevitable. Perhaps most significantly, King Abdullah II of Jordan felt sufficiently confident of Assad’s fall to call for…
Yesterday, three American students were arrested in Cairo for participating in riots that have to date killed 38. A spokesman at the justice ministry claims that the three were throwing Molotov cocktails from the top of an American University in Cairo building near Tahrir Square. The three are…
The Obama administration’s Iran policy rested on three pillars—the peace process, engagement, and containment. The first would win the newly elected president credit with the Arab people of the Middle East and empower the Arab states to gather in a robust coalition against Tehran. As for the…
There was another attack on Coptic Christians today as they marched through the Cairo neighborhood of Shoubra. Until the late 1960s, it was predominantly a Coptic district (today, some estimate, it is 40 percent Copt), which is why the rally’s organizers felt reasonably safe to march. Instead,…
Opposition forces stormed the parliament yesterday after marching on the house of the prime minister, Sheikh Nasser Mohammad al-Ahmed al-Sabah, to demand he resign. Protesters hold the prime minister responsible for failing to fight the country's growing corruption—this report from Al Arabiya's…
Almost a month after law enforcement officials announced they had foiled a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States and bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies in the American capital, there’s still some doubt in many U.S. policy circles that the Iranians could’ve been involved.…
The threat against the life of the American ambassador to Syria comes during a bad streak for the Obama administration. First was the Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States and bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies, while incurring perhaps hundreds of American casualties.…
Killing Muammar Qaddafi wasn’t easy. What President Obama said would take days wound up taking eight months. At first the administration did not seem to understand that NATO’s objective of protecting the civilians rising up against the Libyan tyrant’s 40-year rule would require capturing or killing…
Last week, federal authorities arrested Mansoor
Yesterday, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chair Diane Feinstein, appeared on Fox News Sunday to explain that the Obama administration has solid proof Iran was plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in Washington. The case, said Feinstein, is “dead bang” and the signals…
Russia and China’s October 4 veto of a U.N. -Security Council resolution on Syria elicited a strong response from U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice. “The United States is outraged,” said Rice, “that this Council has utterly failed to address an urgent moral challenge and a growing threat to…
This past Sunday night, the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak took another wrong turn when the same army once believed to be “hand in hand” with the people killed 27 Coptic Christians in Cairo and wounded hundreds of others. The Copts were marching toward Egyptian state television in…
On Sunday, the grand mufti of Syria warned the West that the Assad regime is prepared to play hardball in the event of foreign intervention. “I say to all of Europe, I say to America, we will set up suicide bombers who are now in your countries, if you bomb Syria or Lebanon,” Ahmad Badreddine…
If there’s no crying in baseball, as Tom Hanks explained in A League of Their Own, there is plenty of weeping in baseball movies—from Bang the Drum Slowly and The Natural to the newest offering, Moneyball. I’d extend a spoiler alert at this point, but the tears that Brad Pitt, playing Oakland A’s…
Ladbrokes of London, the famous British bookmaker, lists the Syrian-born poet Adonis as a 4 to 1 favorite to win this year’s Nobel Prize, due to be announced in the next few days. According to one Ladbrokes official, “I really think this is poetry’s year, and without a doubt, the politically…
Some have praised President Obama’s September 20 speech at the U.N. as his most rousing defense of Israel to date. Perhaps so—though that’s not saying much. It rather seems to us that the president merits some credit—but only some—for a growing self-awareness, both of his own limits and of the…
In Newsweek, Eli Lake reports that “Obama Sold Israel Bunker-Buster Bombs.” Actually, as the story notes, it was George W. Bush who ordered the bombs toward the end of his second term. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert wanted them delivered in 2007, but Bush told him to wait until…
Jerusalem
Regional reactions to Obama’s U.N. speech yesterday are starting to come in, including some very ugly responses. Here, for instance is a column from Adel Abd al-Rahman, a Palestinian journalist from al-Hayat al-Jadida, an official daily newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, that makes much of the…
Jerusalem—Jeffrey Goldberg reported last week that former defense secretary Robert Gates thinks that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “ungrateful” for all that Washington has done for Israel. The purpose of the story, leaked by senior administration officials, is to blame Netanyahu for…
It is true that the Christians of the Middle East are a persecuted minority—like all regional minorities, from the Shiites to the Druze and from the Kurds to the Jews. And the Christians are already suffering at the hands of Sunni extremists in Iraq and Egypt. But still, it is impossible to feel…
The Israeli press is still trying to figure out what to make of Robert Gates’s parting shot at Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to Jeffrey Goldberg’s column earlier this the week, Gates thinks that Netanyahu is “ungrateful.”
With Muammar Qaddafi perhaps on his last legs, Libyan rebel leaders are looking for $5 billion to rebuild a country wracked by nearly half a year of civil war. It’s hardly surprising that the first international aid conference is scheduled for Qatar, since no Arab leader has provided more…
Earlier today, Syrian security forces arrested the brother of a Syrian opposition leader in exile, Radwan Ziadeh, who is now a George Washington University visiting scholar. Thirty-seven-year-old Yassin Ziadeh was at a demonstration after prayers (for the eid al-fitr holiday), Radwan told me on the…
Congratulations to President Obama for finally calling on Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to step down. It was past time for the White House to break decisively with a regime that has been slaughtering its people for almost six months, with a death toll conservatively estimated at 2,000 and…
With Muammar Qaddafi surrounded in Tripoli, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad may be starting to fear more for his future. Perhaps he’s thinking that the international coalition that brought down the Libyan leader may now turn its attention to him—but now with a victory, once thought uncertain,…
In his statement yesterday demanding that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad step down, President Obama said: "we have heard [the Syrian opposition's] strong desire that there not be foreign intervention in their movement.” Perhaps so, but today opposition members are happy that the White House is on…
In his statement yesterday demanding that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad step down, President Obama said: "we have heard [the Syrian opposition's] strong desire that there not be foreign intervention in their movement.” Perhaps so, but today opposition members are happy that the White House is on…
President Obama’s statement demanding Bashar al-Assad step down as president of Syria was quickly followed by similar condemnations coming from the French, Germans, British, the EU, and Canadians. “To have them all fall in line is a hell of an accomplishment, especially in summertime,” Syria…
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Jay Solomon and Nour Malas report on the Syrian regime’s dirty work in the United States, spying on and intimidating dissidents. (Indeed, Syria has been engaged in subterfuge for the last few months.) Sometimes Bahar al-Assad’s henchmen made good on their threats.
Beirut—Press reports over the last few days claim that the Obama administration is preparing to announce that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad must step down. However, an official readout from the president’s conversation with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan this afternoon suggests…
Beirut—Kuwait and Bahrain are the most recent additions to the list of Gulf Cooperation Council states that have withdrawn their ambassadors to Syria. First Qatar yanked its diplomat, after a regime-led mob attacked Doha’s embassy in Damascus. Now, with the ruler in Damascus laying siege to Deir…
Yesterday, Matar Ibrahim Matar, a former member of parliament from the main opposition bloc, Al Wefaq, was released from detention after more than three months in a Bahraini jail, where, he told the BBC, he was tortured. Matar was pulled out of his home by Bahraini security forces on May 2.
In some polls of Middle East opinion, Obama ranks lower than Bush. And now here come assessments from the region's intelligentsia. "Give Obama an ‘F’ in the Middle East," writes Lebanese journalist Michael Young, author of the award winning account of the Cedar Revolution, The Ghosts of Martyrs…
In today’s New York Times, Avi Jorisch argues that the U.S. should seize the Iranian embassy and other assets belonging to the Islamic Republic. The purpose isn’t retaliation for the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran more than 31 years ago, but rather to pressure Iran for funding terrorist…
President Obama deserves some credit for using strong language to condemn the Syrian regime’s massacre of peaceful protestors over the weekend in Hama, Deraa, Idlib and other cities in the pre-Ramadan onslaught. With reports still coming in, the most conservative assessment estimates that 145 were…
The week of August 1 marks the beginning of Ramadan, the monthlong celebration that for many Muslims is the central event of the calendar. Where daytime fasting is the most arduous aspect of the season, especially when the holiday falls in midsummer, that discipline is alleviated come sundown, when…
In Egypt, it’s “Friday in Defense of Identity and Popular Will,” which has brought hundreds of thousands Islamist supporters to the streets, from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Alexandria.
Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey D. Feltman told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs this afternoon that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad isn’t going to survive the 5-month long uprising against his regime. “He can’t win this,” said Feltman, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Near…
Journalist and Arab media specialist Hussain Abdul Hussain links to a remarkable film about the Syrian uprising, Syria’s Youth Revolutionaries:
The American Islamic Leadership Coalition is a gathering of more than 25 organizations and leaders (including C. Holland Taylor’s LibForAll) that is broadly representative of moderate Islam here in the United States. Now the outfit has just released its response to the Obama administration’s…
The U.S. embassy isn’t the only diplomatic compound that’s been stormed in Damascus. The Qatari embassy was attacked twice, compelling Doha to withdraw their ambassador last week.
Recently the Obama administration confirmed that it intends to resume official contact with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Middle East's first, and foremost, Islamist organization. A few days ago, Michael Totten sat down with Brotherhood official Esam El-Erian in Cairo for a long interview. Totten…
Yesterday, Claire Berlinski wrote about meeting a couple of Syrians from the city of Hama, which was leveled by Hafez al-Assad in 1982 and is now again threatened by Hafez’s scion, Bashar al-Assad. Today, Berlinski explains why events in Syria matter to the U.S., from Ambassador Robert Ford’s trip…
What should the Obama administration do in the wake of the attack on the U.S. embassy in Damascus? Elliott Abrams rightly counsels the White House either to raise the stakes or withdraw Ambassador Robert Ford. We'll see how it plays out in the Syrian and Arab media over the next few days, but right…
Poor Juan Cole. The University of Michigan professor never had a chance against the vast powers arrayed against him over the last several years. It seems the academic was the target of a conspiracy, engineered by the Bush administration, with the connivance of the intelligence community and that…
Syrian protestors greet US ambassador Robert Ford with roses as his car entered Hama this afternoon during the midst of more Friday protests against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Ford wished to show his solidarity with the opposition, but is he also signaling a change in American policy?
On July 1 Moroccans will vote on a set of constitutional changes proposed by their king, Mohammed VI. These new amendments guarantee the full equality of women and the rights of minorities, like the Berbers, whose language, Amazigh, will now be an official language alongside Arabic; they…
Today’s Asharq al-Awsat, the London-based pan-Arab daily, reports on the role of “Syrian embassies abroad in sabotaging and subverting any movement or activity aiming at expressing solidarity with the Syrian people, and at taking a stand condemning the regime's repressive actions.” In Berlin, the…
Bashar al-Assad’s speech today, promising reforms and evincing paranoia, has done little to quell the three-month-old uprising against him and his regime. “Liar, liar,” opposition forces chanted in Lattakia.
Half a year after the fall of Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, it’s time for a partial reckoning of the Arab Spring. Verdict: Uncertain.
Bashar al-Assad's cousin Rami Makhlouf, or the man even the New York Times is calling Syria's "Mr. Five Percent," has decided to give back to the community, somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. The regime in Damascus may hope to impress Washington, which has sanctioned Makhlouf, but…
Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati has finally managed to form a cabinet. Since Saad Hariri’s “national unity” government was toppled in January, due to disagreements over the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) investigating the assassination of Hariri’s father Rafiq, it is hardly surprising that…
With Syrian troops poised to take revenge for the clash that reportedly left 120 military and security personnel dead last week in the northern town of Jisr al-Shughour, the Obama administration still can’t figure out where it stands on Bashar al-Assad.
Syria instigated violence on its border with Israel this past weekend when it dispatched Palestinian refugees to the Golan Heights to commemorate the 44 anniversary of the June 1967 war, what Gamal abd el-Nasser called the Naksa. Syrian authorities say that Israeli troops killed 23 on the border,…
It can’t give many Americans much lasting pleasure that the Israeli prime minister humbled our commander in chief this week on his home turf. To be sure, a president who seems to relish provoking public confrontations with an ally may have had it coming, but in the end Netanyahu’s speech before…
President Obama’s speech on May 19 outlining the administration’s Middle East policy vindicates his predecessor’s freedom agenda, though the two men reached the same place by different paths. It was the 9/11 attacks that forced George W. Bush to conclude that promoting democracy and human rights in…
President Obama, the Wall Street Journal reports, is preparing a speech that “will ask those in the Middle East and beyond to reject Islamic militancy in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death and embrace a new era of relations” with the United States. Killing bin Laden is the pretext for part two of…
It’s Friday, so Syrians are out in the streets again protesting, as they have been on every Friday now for almost two months, braving the atrocities of a regime that has surrounded several Syrian cities with tanks and allegedly fired on its citizens with artillery.
Three months after the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak, the new Egypt is still sorting itself out—and perhaps will be for some time to come. Observers are concerned about both the country’s domestic problems—attacks on the Coptic Community, the rise of the long-repressed Salafi movement,…
Tariq Ramadan is the latest in a long chorus to criticize the Obama administration for killing Osama bin Laden. The organization that his grandfather Hassan al-Banna started, the Muslim Brotherhood, along with its Palestinian branch Hamas, mourned the death of the holy warrior, while more moderate…
With the news of Osama bin Laden’s death sating much of the world’s appetite for reports from the Middle East, the Syrian regime has used what is essentially a media blackout to move against the opposition. As the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Hayat reports:
One of the Senate's rising Republican stars is today backing calls for the Obama administration to withdraw the U.S. ambassador to Syria. "Clearly, we should be on the side of the Syrian people longing for freedom and challenging the regime's corrupt and repressive rule," writes Senator Marco…
A Wall Street Journal editorial today makes the very valuable point that Syria is an enemy of the U.S. Given its role as a transit point for foreign fighters making their way into Iraq to kill American soldiers, its alliance with Hamas and Hezbollah, its alleged role in the assassination of…
Cairo
Beirut
It’s not on the front pages of the Western press, and it’s not leading the hour for the main Arab satellite networks like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, but the Syrian uprising continues apace, while the Assad regime’s countermeasures are becoming increasingly brutal.
Manama, Bahrain
Manama, Bahrain
Beirut
Beirut
Beirut
Manama, Bahrain
The uprisings sweeping the Middle East have started to blow down some very dark doors—the doors that lead to the dungeons and prisons where Arab security services do their work.
Cairo -- Polling places are packed today as Egyptians are casting their votes to ratify six amendments to the country’s constitution in what may be Egypt’s freest and fairest election ever. Because the military is running the show, penalties are stiff for voter fraud, and very few seem tempted to…
Cairo
Cairo
Beirut
Beirut
It's hard to tell how many protesters are in the streets of the Syrian capital, but it's hardly surprising that, after Egypt and Libya, the regime in Damascus might be next in line. Bashar al-Assad and his security chiefs guessed as much, which is why the last few weeks they warned the foreign and…
After three weeks, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s ruthless response to the Libyan uprising has resulted in upwards of 3,000 deaths, according to a Paris-based human rights organization, while a Libyan organization believes the fatalities are more than twice the French estimate. And yet, if it is clear…
The majority Saudi-owned and Dubai-based Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) provides its subscribers in the Arab states with a large number of channels, including movies, music and other entertainment, but is best known for Al Arabiya, the 24-hour satellite news network. And it is Al Arabiya…
The brewing civil war in Libya is likely to drag in much of the region, Central Africa as well as North Africa and the Middle East. Already rumors suggest that this is coming true.
Press TV, Iran’s state-owned English-language news network, is reporting that amid all the turmoil now unfolding in Libya the famous Lebanese cleric and founder of the Amal movement, Moussa Sadr, may be alive.
While official news coming out of Libya is scarce right now, we thought we’d bring to your attention to the sharpest political travelogues from the country in the last few years.
After almost a week of escalating violent reprisals against protestors and soldiers who have joined the anti-regime forces, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and his sons have yet to quell the uprisings—and the White House has yet to take a public stand. Last night, Secretary Clinton released a statement,…
Egypt’s Suez Canal Authority claims that Iran has scrapped plans to send two warships through the Suez, but Tehran denies it and says those vessels are still on their way. Whether those ships make it to the Suez or not isn’t important right now, because it’s only a test, and not just for Egypt’s…
Nir Rosen, as it turns out, had pro-Taliban inclinations for quite some time. And so it should not really come as a surprise that a person who’d be willing to defend the terrorist organization might mock a woman—in this case, CBS’s Lara Logan—for being sexually assaulted in Cairo.
Unconfirmed reports are circulating that former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has fallen into a coma in Sharm al-Sheikh. The independent Egyptian daily Al Masry Al Youm's English-language website says that Mubarak fainted twice during his final speech Thursday night. The report also seems to…
Washington has finally found out what $1.3 billion in annual military aid means to Hosni Mubarak’s tottering regime: It is a bribe to make the Egyptians do what is already in their self-interest. It seems that the American aid package (close to another billion is designated for economic assistance)…
Here are two different, though not necessarily contradictory, perspectives on the uprisings in Egypt over the last two weeks: In Foreign Affairs, Egypt specialist Joshua Stacher argues the military never lost control of the ground, and over at Just Journalism, Michael Weiss interviews Shiraz Maher,…
Rabat, Morocco
Fox News is reporting that an assassination attempt has been made on newly named Egyptian vice president Omar Suleiman. Two of the longtime intelligence chief’s bodyguards, Fox says, were killed in the attack. Egyptian security officials, reports Al Arabiya, are denying the reports.
Yesterday we noted that unconfirmed reports coming out of Cairo claim that Egypt's former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly has been detained. Presumably it was Adly, either on his own initiative or under orders from above, who last week released prisoners into the general population to add to the…
Here's a very graphic video of an Egyptian police truck running over anti-regime demonstrators. As the vehicle cruises past, without having stopped, you can hear demonstrators referring to the police as "infidels," "sons of bitches" and then starting a chant, "Hosni Mubarak is falling."
Over the last several years, our brother-in-blogging in Cairo, the Egyptian Sandmonkey, has made a name for himself as one of the Middle East’s most irreverent commentators. Anti-anti-Bush and anti-anti-Zionist, his free-wheeling blog, where he often responds to commenters—especially of the…
Just last night I had encouraged an Egyptian friend, Raouf, living in the United States, who wanted to go back home to witness his country’s historic events. “I need to see this,” he told me excitedly. Now with fighting in the streets today I’m not so sure.
Reports from Egypt say that protests across the country’s major cities are getting violent. And now the ruling National Democratic Party’s headquarters are on fire in Cairo (follow the live stream here). But even before the demonstrations that were held after Friday prayers today turned volatile,…
Egyptian sources are dismissing reports that Gamal Mubarak and his family have left Cairo for London. If those earlier accounts were not outright propaganda, they seem to have been based more on wishful thinking than reality.The Mubarak regime is not as brittle as that of Tunisia’s erstwhile…
As the remnants of Lebanon's March 14 pro-democracy has taken to the streets of Beirut and other Lebanese cities to protest against what has now become a government led by Hezbollah and its allies, it's worth remembering why the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) matters. Hezbollah wants to cashier…
Last week Tunisians deposed their president for life, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. So now we have the week of tear gas in the Middle East, with Arab security services and militaries pitted against their countrymen. In Egypt, riot police are firing tear gas at protesters, and the same is so in Algeria,…
A few years ago I was in the West Bank with a Christian missionary who worked among Jews and Muslims. The Jewish converts came to his home for Sunday services that were held in both English and Hebrew. But to gather with Arab converts he had to meet them secretly on the outskirts of their town lest…
Tunisia’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali abandoned his post on Friday after 23 years, and has reportedly landed in Saudi Arabia. To retire from the position of president-for-life is an exceedingly rare move for an Arab regime chief. Indeed, no modern Arab ruler before Ben Ali has ever willingly…
As Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri was in Washington to meet with President Obama this morning, Hezbollah and its allies withdrew from the Lebanese cabinet, setting the table for what many fear is an inevitable escalation of violence in the eastern Mediterranean. The Obama administration…
In one of the last interviews with Bob Feller before he died last week at the age of 92, the hall-of-famer said that, “trying to sneak a fastball by Ted Williams was like trying to sneak a sunbeam by a rooster.” The interview with Feller is part of the New York Times’s video feature “The Last…
Now that the 2022 World Cup has been given to Qatar, details of improprieties in the decision-making process of international soccer’s governing board, FIFA, are starting to trickle out. There are rumors that the small emirate in the Persian Gulf with the world’s third largest reserves of natural…
Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri’s planned trip to Tehran Saturday, November 27, is perhaps best understood as a coda to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tour of Lebanon two months ago. With that visit, the Islamic Republic of Iran effectively declared that the tiny country of 4.1 million on the Eastern…
The first time Jonathan Spyer went to Lebanon was in the summer of 2006 war when he drove a tank in Israel’s war with Hezbollah. He and I met in Jerusalem in July shortly before he was called up for reserve duty. The riveting and tragic story of his unit’s travails in a war that neither Israel’s…
When Cat Stevens was introduced at Jon Stewart’s recent “Rally to Restore Sanity,” the musician also known by his Muslim name Yusuf Islam was greeted with warm applause and howls of approval. It was a strange reception coming from a culturally savvy, mostly twentysomething audience, for while…
Last week Lebanese security forces arrested Omar Bakri and several associates on terrorism charges. Bakri, as you’ll recall, is the Lebanese national who was once leader of the London-based Islamist outfit Al-Muhajiroun and returned to Lebanon in 2005 after he was thrown out of England following…
With the 5-hour miniseries “Carlos” premiering this week on the Sundance channel and opening in art theatres in selected U.S. cities, there’s renewed interest in the Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez’s career of terror. Undoubtedly his best-known operation, and the movie’s dramatic core, is the…
In next week’s issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Ellen Bork explains how the Nobel Peace Prize given to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is a “huge problem for China’s leaders.” Alas, it’s also turning out to be something of an embarrassment for America’s leaders, too, especially last year’s laureate,…
This morning the Swedish academy awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature to Mario Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” With benefactors like the ones who authored this overwrought passage, who…
Tomorrow the Swedish Academy will announce the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and various sportsbooks, like Ladbroke’s, are laying odds. But since the Swedish academy’s methods for selecting the prize-winner are a mystery to all but its members, those odds reflect almost exclusively the…
If it’s still unclear exactly what the Stuxnet worm was meant to target, it’s possible that we won’t entirely understand the consequences of this now notorious malware attack for many years to come. Maybe it will turn out that Stuxnet was little more than the over-hyped tech version of the recent…
Jeffrey Goldberg is back from Cuba, where he was summoned by Fidel Castro after the former Cuban president read Goldberg’s recent article on the likelihood of an Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear program. Goldberg promises that his Havana adventure will be the subject of a forthcoming story,…
Terry Jones may have called off his Koran burning in Florida, but Iraqpundit writes that someone still owes the preacher a debt of gratitude:
When Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahhar threw his support behind the Ground Zero mosque, it became clear that what started as a political controversy is also a national security issue. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says it is wrong to ask where Imam Feisal Rauf is raising money for his project,…
Even after Octavia Nasr apologized for her ill-advised “tweet” over the July 4 holiday expressing her “respect” for the recently deceased Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, CNN fired its senior editor for Middle East affairs. And now bloggers and journalists are up in arms. Some are blaming the job action…
Beirut
With his new film Tetro billed to open Beirut's recent International Film Festival, Francis Ford Coppola was diverted from landing in the Lebanese capital when it was learned that his private plane used parts manufactured in Israel. Fortunately, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, whose Lebanese ally…
The Obama administration's Arab-Israeli peace process is in more trouble than even the White House realizes. To be sure, the Israelis and Palestinians are both dug in, and when the president sought baby steps from the Arabs toward normalizing relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Kuwait…
Beirut
The Shrine of the Bab, this Israeli port city's most distinctive architectural feature, is the final resting place of Siyyid Ali Muhammad, born in Shiraz, Persia, in 1819, one of the two founders of the Baha'i faith, and best known as the Bab, Arabic for "gate." He was the forerunner of the other…
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Saad al-Hariri's Mostaqbal party agreed to a constitutional amendment that would allow Lebanese Armed Forces Commander Michel Suleiman to be elected president. Up until now, Hariri and his March 14 allies (the date of the 2005 Cedar Revolution) had resisted Suleiman's…
WITH THE DEMOCRATS pushing so hard for withdrawal from Iraq, the party seems unaware that they may be making the job much harder for themselves should they get the chance to govern again someday. After all, the United States has many vital strategic interests in the region, and it is not obvious…
BIKFAYA, where three people were killed and many others injured earlier this week by a bomb planted on a bus, is in the Christian heartland of Mount Lebanon, and has hosted a large Christian community since well before the time of the Islamic conquests. In the past, the high mountain passes…
PRESUMABLY, outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has already sent condolences to his old friend, the former president of Lebanon, Amin Gemayel. On Tuesday, his son, Pierre, the 34-year-old minister of Industry was killed in Beirut when an assassin stepped up to his car window and shot him.
Jerusalem
Jerusalem
THE CIVIL WAR IN LEBANON may have already begun, or perhaps it never ended and is now entering a new phase after 16 years of relative calm. Yesterday a roadside bomb injured Lt. Col. Samir Shehade of the Internal Security Forces and killed four of his associates. Shehade had been assisting the U.N.…
Jerusalem
Jerusalem
Jerusalem
Jerusalem
Damascus
Jerusalem
Jerusalem
Damascus
Damascus
Damascus
Beirut
Damascus
Beirut
Beirut
Beirut
U.S. MIDDLE EAST policy is undergoing an identity crisis. The giddy days of roll-back seem like a distant memory now, as a president who staked his historical legacy on Arab democracy grants Gamal Mubarak an audience at the White House while his father's government is beating and arresting…
IN THE WAKE of two terrorist attacks in Sinai this week, first against the tourist sector in Dahab, then against the Multi-National Peacekeeping Force, some observers have related Mubarak's situation to that of President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981. It's a useful comparison because, like Sadat at the…
MUSLIMS all over the world are so angry about a series of cartoons poking fun at the Messenger of God that by now pretty much every Danish and Norwegian flag in the Muslim world has met its fiery end. And yet only in Damascus and Beirut have institutions--embassies or consulates--representing…
Beirut
Damascus
Cairo
Amman, Jordan
Beirut
Beirut
THE CEDAR REVOLUTION HAS TAKEN so many interesting narrative turns, it is easy to forget that the Lebanese opposition confronts a criminal regime in Syria that is more isolated than ever and for that reason quite possibly more dangerous than before. While some repentant skeptics have grudgingly…
Moukhtara, Lebanon
Homs, Syria