Posted in Harvey Sicherman, Robert Satloff, Michael Mandelbaum, Robert J. Lieber, Josef Joffe, J. Scott Carpenter, Martin Kramer, Walter Laqueur, Joshua Muravchik, Geopolitics on Jul 3rd, 2008 No Comments »
MESH marks the Fourth of July by asking this question: Is the American era in the Middle East over? The argument was first made by Richard Haass in an article published in 2006:
The American era in the Middle East… has ended…. It is one of history’s ironies that the first war in Iraq, a […]
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From Chuck Freilich
Thirty years ago, in his magnificent book on Perception and Misperception, Robert Jervis argued that people’s views are self-reinforcing. Once we believe something to be the case, we further develop an array of arguments to discount those pesky doubts that we may harbor and to fully convince ourselves that our initial position is […]
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Earlier this month, Israel sent more than 100 warplanes on military maneuvers across the Eastern Mediterranean. An unnamed U.S. official described the exercise as practice toward honing the skills for a long-range strike. The assumption is that the maneuvers signal an Israeli willingness and capability to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, if all other measures to […]
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From Stephen Peter Rosen and Martin Kramer
We are pleased to announce a new paper, the second in our Middle East Papers series. Philip Carl Salzman, professor of anthropology at McGill University and a member of MESH, offers an interpretation of what he calls “Islamic intensification” among the Baluch of southeastern Iran. Often it is assumed […]
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From Gal Luft
What’s behind the sudden burst of willingness on the part of the Saudis, who announced that they will increase oil output by 500,000 barrels per day in the coming months? After all, for many months they were quite unfazed by the economic havoc caused throughout the world by the rise in oil prices. […]
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Posted in Joshua Muravchik, Harvey Sicherman, Robert Satloff, Michael Mandelbaum, Adam Garfinkle, Hezbollah, Terrorism, Matthew Levitt, Palestinians, Democracy on Jun 16th, 2008 6 Comments »
In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered a parting statement under the title “Rethinking the National Interest: American Realism for a New World.” The section on the Middle East includes an elusive passage that would seem to acquiesce in the political inclusion of violent groups. The Rice quote […]
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From Martin Kramer
Last September, when I arrived in Cambridge for my fall stay at Harvard, I opened the Boston Globe and saw this headline over an editorial: “The Other Middle East Conflict.” I immediately said to myself: well, I know what the Middle East conflict is—that’s the Israelis and the Palestinians. So what is […]
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