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Worth noting this past week is an op-ed published on National Review Online by David Feith and Andrew M. Steinberg on why the recent appeal by “some giants of the American political establishment” — namely, “Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Lee Hamilton, and other former high-ranking officials” — for the U.S. to engage in “genuine dialogue” [...]
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Danny Postel of openDemocracy makes a very good point (via Rick Perlstein) about neo-conservative support for the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which has been designated a terrorist group by the State Department, although Postel’s description of the MEK as an “Islamist-Stalinist cult” also expresses quite well what it’s about. He names all the obvious suspects as [...]
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In a further indication of Robert Gates’ efforts to move U.S. policy closer to the center a la Baker-Hamilton, he has appointed John Hamre, the former deputy defense secretary under Bill Clinton, to head the Defense Policy Board (DPB), the advisory body that played an important role under Richard Perle’s chairmanship immediately after 9/11 in [...]
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While Norman Podhoretz seems pretty confident that George W. Bush will indeed attack Iran’s nuclear facilities before the end of his term, other neo-cons, admittedly with less direct access to the president or to Podhoretz’ son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, who directs Middle East policy in the National Security Council, appear much less so. (Speaking of Podhoretz [...]
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Monday night’s speech by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to the ultra-hawkish Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) must have deeply disappointed most of his audience, particularly when it came to his brief discussion of Iran. While Gates repeated the adminstration’s mantra that “all options are on the table,” the degree to which he [...]
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Thanks to those of you who informed me that an article I wrote a few months ago about the neo-conservative role in promoting the Iran divestment campaign was not only cited, but actually appeared (however briefly), on the Colbert Report Thursday. It was used by Colbert to introduce his interview of Center for Security Policy [...]
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For a provocative and remarkably concise historical analysis of the “Clash of Civilizations” and its relationship to the Zionist movement leading up to next month’s Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, take five minutes to read Uri Avnery’s latest essay for Peace Now, entitled “The Mother of All Pretexts.” I rather doubt it was Samuel [...]
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Republican presidential candidate and current front-runner, Rudi Giuliani, has named seven more people, including four prominent neo-conservatives, to his already-neocon-dominated foreign policy team. The neo-conservatives include Ruth Wedgwood of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; “terrorism analyst” and free-lance writer often published in the Weekly Standard and the National Review Online, Thomas Joscelyn; [...]
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Having spent two weeks in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, Joshua Muravchik, the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) long-time democracy advocate who since last winter has been repeatedly calling for the Bush administration to carry out air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, is visiting yet another Arab country at the moment — Iraq. And he seems [...]
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An important indication of where the balance of power within the administration stands vis-a-vis Iran policy is likely to emerge in the next week or two when a decision is due on whether to release the five Iranians who have been held by U.S. forces in Iraq since they were seized in a raid on [...]
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