The Young Syrian

The Jerusalem Report / page 24

Ammar Abdulhamid hopes to spark an intellectual renaissance and encourage political reform at home in Damascus.

Yigal Schleifer / Istanbul

SYRIAN PUBLISHER AND author Ammar Abdulhamid doesn’t like to think small scale. The founder of a year-old nonprofit Damascus publishing house, Abdulhamid is embarking on a translation project through which he plans to introduce the Syrian public to the classic literary and philosophical works of the Western canon. Continue reading “The Young Syrian” →

Taking it seriously

Those who think that the difficulties the Americans are having in Iraq are going to make them rethink their commitment to effecting serious change in the Middle East and adopt some kind of a neutral hands-off stance vis-à-vis regional developments are, simply put, deluding themselves. In fact, the invasion of Iraq promises to be merely the beginning of a long period of direct American interventionism in the region. Whatever difficulties the Americans are bound to encounter along the way, whatever changes should take place at the helm, substituting Democrats for Republicans, conservatives for liberals, doves for hawks, or vice versa, could affect the choice of the particular interventionist strategy to be deployed, but it will have no impact on the interventionist policy itself. The United States has no option but to intervene. Continue reading “Taking it seriously” →

A View From Inside Syria

The text of a lecture given at the Woodrow Wilson Center during my first ever visit to Washington, D.C. which also marked my first venture back to the U.S. since I left in September of 1994.

The Syrian Shadow Government and the Possibilities of Change

Introduction

Syrian-American relations have always been much too complex, despite the fact that they have always been rather minimal. There was hardly a time when the relations between the two countries could be described as warm or cordial, not to mention strong. As such, the current observable lack of good will, to put it mildly, between the two sides is not exactly a new phenomenon or a peculiar development. Rather, there are many outstanding issues in Syrian-American relations that remain unresolved and that have not, in fact, been seriously addressed yet. Continue reading “A View From Inside Syria” →

From Nationalism to Country-Building: A Necessary Shift in Emphasis

Introduction

Observers of Middle East contemporary politics have always contended that the Palestinian cause has often been used by the various ruling Arab regimes to distract the minds of their oppressed peoples from the need for internal political, economic and social reforms. There is an urgent need, however, now that the region seems to be undergoing conditions similar to those that existed in the early twentieth century, to flesh out this argument even further. Continue reading “From Nationalism to Country-Building: A Necessary Shift in Emphasis” →