More in ‘Iraq’

• After Hamas claimed responsibility for killing four Israelis (and promised further attacks), the Palestinian Authority proceeded on one of its largest-ever arrestings. [Haaretz]
• Thomas Friedman predicts that extremist efforts to thwart peace, from Rabbi Yosef’s comments about Palestinians to yesterday’s attack, are only going to get worse. [NYT]
• U.S. envoy George Mitchell spoke cryptically ...

From the beginning of the nuclear era we have focused on states and national leaders who decide whether to seek nuclear weapons. What is new and central to recent efforts to join the nuclear weapons club are the role of supplying companies, some witting, others acting with studious inadvertence, and still others duped by the ...

Tablet Magazine invited experts from the foreign policy community—policymakers, diplomats, activists, and analysts from both Washington and the Middle East—to offer their assessments of President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy. A year and a half into one of the most celebrated presidencies in recent memory—celebrated not just here but throughout much of the world—has Obama ...

“What the hell are you guys doing getting a suntan on a day like this?” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Don’t you know that everything around you is falling apart?” That scolding from a friend of mine, a staff officer at the Israel Defense Forces’ western command in Southern Lebanon, ...

A few weeks ago, Shoshana Raziel, aged 92, died in Jerusalem. The Israeli press—preoccupied with the gargantuan corruption scandal that put everyone from the former director of the country’s largest bank to the capital’s former deputy mayor behind bars—barely found room for an obituary. But with Shoshana died a sliver of Israeli history, a legend ...

Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command and former commander of the multinational force in Iraq, next month will receive an award from the American Enterprise Institute named for Irving Kristol, the so-called godfather of the neo-conservatives. Petreaus made his name with the 2008 surge of U.S. forces in Iraq, for which the AEI ...

According to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Vice President Biden did not, as some had alleged, tell Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israeli settlements endangered U.S. troops. But what about the venerable General David Petraeus, who heads the U.S. military’s Central Command (which is responsible for Central Asia and most of the Middle East)? ...

“If you can talk to an insurgency that kills Americans, it should be easy to talk to ones that don’t,” Mark Perry tells me on the phone. Perry is author of the recently published Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage With Its Enemies, a book documenting his meetings with terrorists around the Middle East, ...

As Iraq’s March 7 election draws near, I can’t help reflecting on how far the Iraqi nation, now entrenched in factionalism, has departed from the commitment to multiculturalism so vital to its birth. “There is no meaning in the words Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the terminology of patriotism, there is simply a country called ...

Last Friday afternoon, we worried that high tensions between Israel and Syria—most immediately prompted by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s threats to Syrian leader Bashar Assad—could lead to violence. Well, fortunately, they haven’t so far, and hot tempers have appeared to cool over the weekend. Which can allow us now to focus on the broader question ...