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April 9 was the sixth anniversary of the fall of the Saddam Hussein government in Iraq. The date passed without much remark in the United States, which is consumed with its own domestic economic problems and high rates of unemployment, rendering a distant foreign misadventure virtually invisible. Gone are the debates over whether a US […]

Humanities West, a San Francisco cultural institution, is having a program April 17-18 on Napoleon at which I will speak on Napoleon’s Egypt. Media Contact: Genevieve Antaky510/482-3553, gantaky@comcast.net Public Info: Humanities West www. humanitieswest. org Tickets: City Box Office 415/392-4400, www. cityboxoffice. com. (There are still plenty of tickets, so come on down.) HUMANITIES WEST […]

The US will join Germany and United Nations Security Council partners in face to face negotiations with Iran on its nuclear enrichment program. The Bush administration generally stayed away from the talks, on the somewhat bizarre theory that talking directly to the Iranians somehow legitimized them. Note that the Bush administration talked to lots of […]

President Barack Obama made an unscheduled stop in Baghdad on Tuesday, meeting with US troops and also with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Obama told US troops there, ‘ this is going to be a critical period, these next 18 months. I was just discussing this with your commander, but I think it’s something that all […]

The USG Open Source Center translates an interview in a Qatari newspaper with the incoming Sunni Arab governor of the northern Ninevah (Ninawa, Mosul) Province, one of the more violent places in Iraq. He focuses on steps that need to be taken by the Kurdistan leaders to improve relations with Sunni Arabs in the north. […]

President Barack Obama conducted a state visit of the Turkish capital of Ankara on Monday, visiting the mausoleum of the Republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Attaturk and addressing parliament. The Turkish officer corps, which had been declining to attend parliament sessions because of the presence of a pro-Kurdish party, put aside its reservations and attended to […]

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that guerrillas set off six coordinated bombs in Shiite areas of Baghdad on Monday, killing 34 and wounding over 100, and raising fears that Iraq was slipping back into major violence. The pan-Arab daily summarizes the explanations being proffered for the resurgence of violence in the Iraqi capital. These include: 1) […]

Barack Obama continues to shake up the world with his new ideas, demonstrating himself again among the more creative and bold leaders the world has seen in the past half-century. In Prague on Sunday, he called for the US to lead a drive to abolish nuclear weapons: ‘ The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons […]

My talk at the New America Foundation on the need for a new Western relationship with the Muslim world, in connection with my new book, “Engaging the Muslim World,” was shown on C-Span 2 this weekend and is now also available at YouTube. Engaging the Muslim World End/ (Not Continued)