At a town hall meeting here last night on U.S. foreign policy, a former Pentagon spokesman and a Syrian scholar found much to criticize not only in the Bush administration’s war on terror, but also in the Islamic world and the underlying causes of terrorism there. Continue reading “Scholar criticizes Islamic world, war on terror”
Special to The Daily Star
To an outside observer, the Syrian regime must seem bent on pursuing a path of confrontation with the rest of the world. At the beginning of the American invasion of Iraq, and thanks to the bellicose posture the Syrian regime adopted during the early stages of the conflict, a similar showdown with the US was averted only at the last minute. This occurred because cooler heads in the Bush administration prevailed in their argument that a quarrel with Syria would, at that stage, distract Washington from its main task in Iraq. Continue reading “Will the Syrian regime take on the world?”
Lecture at the Brookings Institution
Syria has developed a reputation as an esoteric state because of the actions of its late President, Hafez el Asad. Asad’s rural beginnings, military education, and limited exposure to the West contributed to his deep familiarity with Syrian social and political culture. But, it also limited his understanding of ever-changing global realities, especially in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the West, Asad was, nonetheless, perceived as a political genius because Western knowledge of Syria was extremely limited. Continue reading “The Internal Dynamics of Syrian Politics”
Tharwa Editorial / Also published in the Daily Star under the title: “Prepare for when the Arab bottle breaks.”
When you are stuck in the neck of a bottle, it doesn’t matter how far you are from the bottom, or how close you come to the edge of freedom. There are no points of no return. As you struggle to free yourself, you can as easily fail and fall as succeed and climb out of the top. For those stuck in the neck, though, the option of not doing anything, of accepting their bondage, seems like the safest bet. But what happens when they realize that an overwhelming force may threaten to break the bottle? What is the safest bet then? Continue reading “Stuck in the Bottleneck”
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 