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Thanks to Mark Ganzer for digging back out a long post of mine from summer of 2002 about the Iraq War, then looming, and its likely consequences: Reprint edition from July 31, 2002: There is not any doubt that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz intend to go to war against Baghdad, and the signs I’ve seen are […]

The increasingly sleazy John McCain, who once promised to run a clean campaign, has now attacked my friend Rashid Khalidi and attempted to use him against Barack Obama. Khalidi is an American scholar of Palestinian heritage, born in New York and educated at Yale and Oxford, who now teaches at Columbia University. He directed the […]

AFP reports: “Pakistani and Afghan officials and tribal leaders agreed Tuesday to make contact with Taliban militants in an attempt to end the raging insurgent violence along their porous border. The declaration came after two days of talks in Islamabad aimed at finding a lasting solution to the unrest which has wracked the region since […]

The McCain campaign is now warning against “one party rule” if Obama is elected president at at time when there will likely be a Democratic landslide in the House and the Senate. Well, first of all, having one party in control of the White House and Congress could have the benefit of allowing them to […]

The USG Open Source Center surveys the Middle Eastern press reaction to the US raid on Abu al-Kamal in Syria, finding it mostly negative and based on Syrian reports. Lesson: If the US had just gotten word out about its side of the story more quickly and effectively, it might have blunted the generally negative […]

Ooops, typo in title. Go here for “The Hypocrisy of the ‘One Party Rule’ Gambit”

In Baghlan in northern Afghanistan, a suicide bomber killed two US troops while meeting at a local police station. Baghlan, a center of sugar beet production, is largely Tajik (Sunni Persian-speakers) but has a Pushtun minority, some of whom are anti-American and anti-Karzai government. In November of 2007, Taliban there hit a sugar factory during […]

More on the US raid on a house in Syria: The LAT wonders if the attack will derail US-Syrian steps toward rapprochement. Syrian officials are complaining that the raid, which left 8 Syrians dead, was ‘irrational’ and contravened international law. Other Syrian denunciations are given in Arabic by al-Sharq al-Awsat. Farmhouse raided in Abu Kamal […]

Although both candidates tie the resurgence of the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan to US domestic security, I personally have difficulty understanding exactly how that works. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the US were planned by Arab expatriates in Hamburg, Germany, and Pushtun tribespeople had almost nothing to do with them (did the Taliban […]