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. Bruce Riedel is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, and a 29-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. His [...]

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From Raymond Ibrahim
In many ways, Michael Scheuer is the paradigmatic case of an otherwise knowledgeable and experienced Western adult who takes Al Qaeda’s word at face value. According to his book, Imperial Hubris, his credentials and thus authority to speak about Al Qaeda and its goals are impressive: “For the past seventeen years, my career [...]

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From Assaf Moghadam
The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point just released a study on the foreign fighters streaming into Iraq. The new study, Bombers, Bank Accounts, and Bleedout: al-Qa’ida’s Road in and Out of Iraq, edited by my colleague Brian Fishman, expands on an analysis of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s personnel records conducted by the [...]

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From Tamara Cofman Wittes
Much of today’s backlash against democracy promotion in the Middle East can be traced to the Hamas victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 2006, and its effect of reinforcing the “Algerian nightmare” complex among nervous Washington policy makers about the prospect for political takeovers of Arab countries by illiberal and anti-American [...]

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From Raymond Ibrahim
At the recent inaugural conference for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), presenter LTC Joseph Myers made an interesting point that deserves further elaboration: that, though military studies have traditionally valued and absorbed the texts of classical war doctrine—such as Clausewitz’s On War, Sun Tzu’s The Art [...]

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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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From Raymond Ibrahim
A new article by Thomas Hegghammer in the Times Literary Supplement, entitled “Jihadi studies: the obstacles to understanding radical Islam and the opportunities to know it better,” lives up to its title—not so much by delineating what these obstacles are, but rather by being representative of them. Regrettably, the author evokes the same [...]

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