Middle East Strategy at Harvard

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Tamara Cofman Wittes is Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution, and a member of MESH. Her […]

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In November 2002, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked a number of scholars this question: “What will the world be like five years after a war with Iraq?” To mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, MESH asked all of the respondents to revisit their predictions. This week, MESH is posting the responses it […]

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From Alan Dowty
Commissions of inquiry are one of the strengths of the Israeli political system. They are taken very seriously, typically composed of highly respected public figures, operate in a highly judicial style, and are accorded considerable attention and deference in the public arena. Moreover, more often than in many other democracies with similar processes, […]

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From Michele Dunne
President Bush’s January 16 stop in Egypt was so short that the press kept forgetting to mention it in discussing the schedule for his Middle East trip, noting that he would spend the last two days in Saudi Arabia. President Mubarak found an opportunity to zing Bush early in their joint press conference, […]

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Charles Issawi (1916-2000) was a leading economic historian of the Middle East and an astute commentator on history, politics, and human nature. In 1956 he published an article on the foundations of democracy and their absence from the Middle East. Below, we reproduce a key passage from that article (in green, beneath Issawi’s photograph). In […]

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