Here’s an interesting piece on the future of US aid to Egypt by Scott Carpenter, who used to run the democracy-promotion office at the State Department until about a year ago. The piece is important because it highlights the little focused on the 2004 MOU between Egypt and the US, which formalized tying aid to [...]

If you read a lot of book reviews, as I do, you will have noticed that many reviewers (especially ones who are also writers or work in the same field as the author of the book) are reticent to go on attack mode when reviewing a peer’s work. Add to that the phenomenon of logrolling [...]

Don’t miss this interesting two-part al-Jazeera English report on the ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood, the defense interests of major media companies and the public impact of propaganda movies about war.

Part I
Will update this post with Part II when it becomes available.
Update: Here’s Part II:

There’s been much about Jeffrey Goldberg’s New York Times piece about how the powerful members of Zionist groups in America are being, er, more Catholic than the Pope (more Talmudic than the Rabbi?) in their inflexibility on the issue of West Bank settlements. Yes, it’s good that a prominent Jewish-American journalist and former IDF soldier [...]

For the last week Dream TV’s interview with President Bush has been talked up in Egypt, but can you understand any of this? And can Bush get any more condescending (and wrong) when he tells the interviewer she has her job because Egypt is a “society that honors diversity and gives people a chance to [...]

Gary Sick, a Columbia University professor and eminent scholar of the Persian Gulf, has written a short essay on Hillary Clinton’s recent threat to “obliterate Iran” should it attack Israel for the excellent Gulf 2000 listserv he maintains. Notwithstanding the chiefly domestic US political reasons that led Clinton to engage in rather vulgar sable-rattling, Sick [...]

Syrian Blogger and opposition activist Ammar Abdulhamid has a very different take on prospects for change in Syria, which he says will be driven by economic factors. I would not be so optimistic (I see the same kind of thinking over Egypt’s current economic crisis) because just like you can’t control a country entirely through [...]

Doug Feith trots out a line about Saddam Hussein being part of an “international terrorist network” just as dangerous as al-Qaeda. This guy is truly shameless.

From Hillary Clinton’s website, her position on the two-state solution:
Hillary Clinton believes that Israel’s right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned.
The fact that the Clintons, after George W. Bush, are the worse thing that [...]

No clear end to occupation:
A confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country.
The draft strategic framework agreement between the US and Iraqi governments, dated March 7 and marked “secret” and “sensitive”, is intended to [...]

From The Washington Note, where American conservatives are angry at the idea of more forays into the “Koran Zone.”

Cheney issues strong defense of Israel.

US struggles to explain AFRICOM vision:

Gen Ward argued that AFRICOM ‘recognises the essential relationship between security, stability, economic development, political advances, things that address the basic needs of the peoples of a region and, importantly, the requirement to do those efforts in as collaborative a way as possible - not to take over the [...]

A very good appearance by Sinan Antoon on Charlie Rose, where he dismisses the “what-went-wrong-in-Iraq” line of argument as forgetting that the US should have never gone in there in 2003 after a decade of sanctions.

This post is not about Ron Paul, since I am not a libertarian and do not agree with most of his views outside of foreign policy (specifically his argument for the end of American empire in the Middle East and major cuts in defense spending). But there is something deeply wrong with Congress when this [...]

I haven’t had time to read the explosive Vanity Fair article on the US-Fatah coup attempt against Hamas yet, but from what I hear about it, it would confirm many of the allegations made around the time of Gaza takeover and that has been published in the Arabic press and elsewhere, not to mention some [...]

From Nir Rosen’s The Myth of the Surge in Rolling Stone, on the co-optation of former insurgents that had caused a decline in violence over the past year in Iraq :

But loyalty that can be purchased is by its very nature fickle. Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. [...]

The appointment, pending congressional approval (which appears to be forthcoming soon), of Margaret Scobey as the next US Ambassador to Egypt has continued to get the local press’ interest, with her testimony to Congress’ Foreign Affairs Committee — notably her mention of the Ayman Nour case and the human rights situation in Egypt — earning [...]

Paul Rogers on the Iraq Project:
In an echo of the Baghdad embassy, Balad has grown to become the largest US air-base anywhere in the world: a fifteen-square-mile mini-city with its own bus routes, fast-food outlets, two supermarkets and accommodation for 40,000 military personnel and contractors. The base - from which up to 550 air [...]