Middle East

Just the thought of another book about Middle East policy under President Bill Clinton might make the most stout-hearted reader quake; but he or she would be well advised to consider Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Martin Indyk. Indyk, who was (twice) U.S. ambassador to Israel, and now directs the Saban Center of Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, has managed to write a new, very readable chronicle of Mideast policy during the Clinton

At this writing, the Gaza crisis continues, exacting a painful toll on the civilian population, hammering Israel’s image in ways unseen since Lebanon in the early 1980s, and relegating talk of peace to the funny pages. The working assumption is that there will be a ceasefire in which Hamas continues to be the governing address for Gaza--a political victory for the Islamic Resistance Movement (the literal translation of the acronym for Hamas).

"Neither side was entirely happy, and that was a good thing," said Ghaith al Omari, who was then a Palestinian negotiator and is now with the American Task ...

Throughout the campaign that culminated in his inauguration yesterday, President Barack Obama called America’s dependence on oil its greatest threat and outlined ambitious plans for energy independence – the American politician’s favorite buzzwords. His energy plan has called for oil savings equivalent to the amount that the United States imports from the Middle East and Venezuela, and he expects these savings to eliminate entirely imports from the Middle East.

What should President Obama do to build on what is widely acknowledged to be Iraq's fragile peace?

As Obama has frequently observed, the United States needs to be "as careful getting out of Iraq as it was careless getting in" because, unlike the case of Vietnam, the United States has substantial strategic interests in Iraq.

As the bombardment of Gaza enters its third week and the civilian death toll continues to rise, Clinton's remarks offer a thin ray of hope that the next president will deviate from the long-set pattern of U.S.-Israeli relations.

The new 22-minute tape posted Wednesday on a radical Islamist Web site is the first one from Osama bin Laden in nine months. On it, the al Qaeda leader urges Muslims to wage jihad against Israel because of its offensive in Gaza.

U.S. counter-terrorism officials had been expecting that bin Laden would release a tape before the 2008 presidential election just as he had done four years earlier.

Over the last several weeks, the world has been focused on the fighting in Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians are ruled by an Islamist political movement committed to the destruction of the State of Israel. Yet several thousand miles away, voters in Bangladesh, a nation of over 150 million, have rejected Islamism and nationalist extremism in an extraordinary election. How is it that Gaza commands the attention of the Western press while a country that has roughly one hundred times the population merits barely a cursory mention?… more

This is a very different war from the one Israel waged in Lebanon during summer 2006; a war that Israel, by almost all measures, lost.

Today Hezbollah is better armed and further entrenched, and has greater prestige in the Sunni world than before the campaign. But Hezbollah had the critical capacity to rearm -- quickly. And it also had the capacity to orchestrate the rebuilding of Southern Lebanon.

Co-Director, Middle East Task Force

Amjad Atallah is the Co-Director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation.