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West Will Regret Unseating Secular Despots - Simon Jenkins, UK Guardian

Assad has not fallen. He is still there, locked in the lethal Muslim schism that resurfaced with the demise of the region's secularist dictators. These have now almost all gone: th...

Liberal Hawks Fall Silent on Syria - Jason Horowitz, Washington Post

For interests on both sides of Syria’s civil war, this has been the week to increase the pressure. Hezbollah sent reinforcements to the troops of President Bashar al-Assad, and R...

Naming America's Nameless War - Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch

For well over a decade now the United States has been “a nation at war.” Does that war have a name?...

Face It: Britain's Wars Fuel Terror - Seumas Milne, The Guardian

Those who send British troops to shed blood in the Muslim world must share the blame for atrocities like Woolwich....

The World Still Needs American Muscle - Robert Kaplan, Stratfor

Security officials in countries as diverse as Japan and Poland, Vietnam and Romania desperately hope that all this talk about American soft power overtaking American hard power is ...

Iraqi Society Fragments - Hadeel al Sayegh, The National

Little did we know that Iraq would unravel so quickly. Violence has always occurred on the outskirts of the capital and in more remote areas in the country. But today, almost thr...

The Innovator Who Almost Killed Saddam Hussein - Nathan Vardi, Forbes

he sun was rising hot and full as members of Israel’s most elite special forces unit approached a crowd in the middle of the desert. Disguised as Iraqis, the soldiers had lan...

Federalism Could Ease Iraq Pressures - Hassan Hassan, The National

There is a certain power to the word taqseem in Arabic. It means any form of partition of a country, and has a cloud of connotations that can invite memories of colonial times an...

Metternich in Baghdad - Ramzy Mardini, Foreign Policy

No, America hasn't "lost" Iraq. But a dangerous realpolitik is the new normal in Baghdad....

The Ghosts of Iraq - Nikolas Gvosdev, The National Interest

One of the apparent subtexts in the contemporary debate over what the United States ought to be doing in Syria is the interest in relitigating the Iraq War. Thus, some of the argum...

Iraq on Brink of Sectarian War - Again - The National

Iraq's increasingly autocratic prime minister, Nouri Al Maliki, has at times seemed more interested in perpetuating the crisis of identity politics than in stopping it. Mr Al Malik...

America, Let the Iraq Syndrome Kick In - Leon Hadar, The National Interest

A majority of the American people have learned the latest historical lesson, have concluded that the Iraq War was a fiasco and that the United States has no responsibility to take ...

A Strong Iran Is Good for U.S. - Robert Kaplan & Kamran Bokhari, Stratfor

Iran, with its nearly 76 million people, is the second-most populous country in the Middle East after Egypt, while its level of education and bureaucratic institutionalization is h...

The Legacy of CPA Order 1 - Steve Negus, The Arabist

The question of what to do about former elites haunts countries that have undergone a radical political transformation. Retain them in office, and dissidents will complain their ...

Yes, Iraq Is Unraveling - Michael Knights, Foreign Policy

As American troops were pulling out of Iraq in 2010, the U.S. effort to stabilize the country resembled the task of an exhausted man who had just pushed a huge boulder up a steep h...

Why Americans Are Snookered About War - Andrew Bacevich, WAJ

For Americans, one big lesson of the Iraq War should be this one: When policymakers and pundits purport to explain what the United States “needs to do” by resorting to ...

Our Syria Myopia - Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast

Still, there’s another, more disturbing, reason that Syria gets so much more ink than Iraq and Afghanistan. American elites aren’t sick of Syria yet. Purely on cost-eff...

The Mideast's Christian Catastrophe - Andrew Doran, Am. Conservative

The recent dedication of George W. Bush’s presidential library in Texas briefly rekindled debate about the defining event of his presidency, the Iraq War. The visceral hatred of ...

How to Stop Iran's Takeover of Syria - Michael Weiss, NOW Lebanon

It's been edifying to see how quickly the international press has discovered that Syrian air defense systems are not quite so "formidable" as they were once described by senior Pen...

Drought Is Ripping the Arab World Apart - Mitch Ginsburg, Times of Israel

Syria is 85 percent desert or semi-arid country. But it has several significant waterways. The Euphrates runs in a south-easterly direction through the center of the country to Ira...

Will Iran-Saudi Proxy War Spread to Iraq? - Mohammed Ayoob, Yale

Matters have been made worse in and for Iraq by the fact that, like Syria, Iraq has become a major theater of a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with Turkey pushed by force...

America's Pundit-Powered Foreign Policy - Robert Kaplan, Stratfor

One feels sympathy for U.S. President Barack Obama. Whatever he does in Syria, he is doomed. Had he intervened a year ago, as many pundits demanded, he might presently be in the mi...

On the Verge of a Regional Mideast War - Irish Times

The uncertainty added by the Israeli raids, although sanctioned in advance by the US, complicates President Obama’s predicament by adding to growing pressures on a deeply rel...

Sunnis Are Restarting Their Insurgency in Iraq - Joel Rayburn, TNR

The Iraq conflict came back into view in the last week of April, when several areas of northern Iraq exploded in violence on a scale not seen since the height of the 2006-2008 civi...

Syria Will Be Obama's Iraq - Faisal Al Yafai, RealClearWorld

Under Obama's presidency, the U.S. has consistently tried to keep at arm's length from the region. Yet foreign affairs -- the Middle East especially -- have a way of defying politi...

Don't Repeat Iraq Mistakes in Syria - Lloyd Green, The Daily Beast

How many Middle East quagmires does America want? How many can it afford? After our so-called triumphs in Iraq and Libya – and our not-so-triumphant 12-year experience in Afgha...

Iraqi Civil War Would Devastate the Middle East - Washington Post

The resumption of sectarian war in Iraq alongside that of Syria would be devastating for the Middle East — and for the interests of the United States. The fragile gains of the Ir...

Syria Is Not Iraq - Bill Keller, New York Times

In Syria, I fear prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy....

Violence Is Going to Tear Iraq Apart, Again - Gulf News

Iraq is facing a dangerous challenge with violence becoming an almost daily event in the country. The process of nation-building seems to be elusive as the country is divided deepl...

'Suicidal Iran' and the Plastic Keys to Paradise - Kevin Sullivan, RCW

The story goes something like this: During the Iran-Iraq War, faced with an invading Iraqi army, the outgunned and overwhelmed Islamic Republic of Iran eventually resorted to "huma...

America Can't Fix Syria - Fareed Zakaria, Time

If the objective is actually to reduce the atrocities and minimize potential instability, the key will be a political settlement that gives each side an assurance that it has a pla...

The Isolationists Are Coming! - Matthew Duss, The American Prospect

Ask yourself: Do you oppose putting U.S. troops everywhere, all the time? If you answered yes, you might be an isolationist, according to the word’s new definition....

Why Nouri al-Maliki Must Go - Nussaibah Younis, New York Times

Nobody wants another civil war in Iraq, yet events are propelling it in that direction. War can be averted only by a new political understanding among three main groups -- Sunni Ar...

Iraq on the Brink, Again - Ryan Crocker, Washington Post

The situation in Iraq has taken a very dangerous turn. Events there in recent days are reminiscent of those that led to virtual civil war in 2006 and resulted in the need for a sur...

Maliki Pushing Iraq's Sunnis to al-Qaeda - Hassan Hassan, The National

Nearly four months of peaceful protests in five Iraqi Sunni areas ended violently last Tuesday after the government's security forces stormed a protest camp in the northern town ...

America's Drone Delusion - Steve Coll, The New Yorker

The Obama Administration has never made clear why it thought that capturing Awlaki and bringing him to trial was infeasible. Nor has it described the specific standards it used to ...

Did Iraq Sanctions Kills Tens of Thousands? - Michael Spagat, Pac Standard

Sanctions allegedly killed hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq and provided a rationale for invasion, a line still heard today. But those deaths almost certainly never happen...

Iraq Could Be the Next Mideast Government to Fall - The Daily Star

In the last few years, the headlines have been dominated by popular uprisings against longtime leaders in the Arab world, but the relatively “new” leadership in Iraq has not be...

Iraq's Kurds Inching Toward Independence - The Economist

Despite assertions to the contrary, Iraq’s Kurds are inching towards outright independence....

Obama Rewrites the U.S. Contract Abroad - Michael Young, Daily Star

After the bomb attacks in Boston Monday, President Barack Obama hesitated to call them acts of terrorism. Obama and his officials soon rectified their conscious error, but the pres...

Iraq's 'Kurdish Spring' Is in Bloom - Jackson Diehl, Washington Post

By now it’s obvious that “spring” is the wrong description of the political turmoil and civil war that have followed the Arab revolutions of 2011. But for one nation in the...

Basra: Symbol of All That's Wrong with Iraq - Birgit Svensson, Die Welt

Ten years after Saddam's fall, Iraq's richest city is rife with courruption and can't even clean up after itself....

Erdogan's Kurdish Gambit - Sinan Ulgen, Project Syndicate

Conflict in the Middle East threatens not only the security of many of its states, but also their continued existence. Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and others, now gripped by sectarian fig...

Kurds Don't Wish to Tear Iraq Apart - Ashti Hawrami, RealClearWorld

The vast energy assets of my country, Iraq, were long abused to fund regional conflicts and instruments of internal repression. No one knows that better than the Kurds, who were th...

Wolfowitz Is Wrong: Iraq Was a Disaster - James Joyner, National Interest

Remarkably, Wolfowitz not only misapprehends the war that he played a vital role in initiating, planning, and overseeing but he has the unmitigated gall to blame people who managed...

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