Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Daniel Byman
The Washington Post’s reporting on the weekend that “all the defendants convicted in the [2000] attack [on the USS Cole] have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials” will hardly surprise anyone watching how Yemen has handled the issue of terrorism since 9/11. While Yemeni security forces have at times made […]

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The U.S. Department of Defense has released translations of a number of Iraqi intelligence documents dating from Saddam’s rule. Most of them deal with the regime’s support for terrorism. One of them is a General Military Intelligence Directorate report from September 2002, entitled “The Emergence of Wahhabism and its Historical Roots.” (The translation may be […]

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From J. Scott Carpenter
As early as this weekend, Geert Wilders, controversial Dutch politician and vocal critic of Islam, will release his new film, Fitna, on the internet. Fitna, which in Arabic means “dissension,” promises to be even more inflammatory in Muslim-majority countries than the Danish cartoons that sparked riots in many capitals in 2006. According […]

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From Bernard Haykel
I’m in Riyadh and the sense I get from the Saudis is that the Bush visit was a success for the President in two ways.
First, Bush was told that while the Gulf States’ leaderships are against an attack on Iran, preferring instead diplomatic and UN-based initiatives, they would not stand in the way […]

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From Bernard Haykel
“Lines in the Sand” (Vanity Fair, January 2008, not online) describes a parlor game undertaken by four Middle East specialists (Kenneth Pollack, Daniel Byman, David Fromkin, and Dennis Ross), in which they imagine what the borders of the Middle East would look like if they were to reflect “underlying contours.” In their map, […]

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