Conflicts Forum

By Mark Perry, Conflicts Forum, July 6, 2007
Thursday, July 5, 2007 was a fairly typical day for the world. In Iraq, two American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb, while the U.S. military reported killing an al-Qaeda member in a military raid west of Baghdad. Seventeen people were killed in Dora — a neighborhood […]

Conflicts Forum, February 25, 2007
It has been two weeks since chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, publicly disagreed with the Bush administration’s assessment of “Iranian meddling” in Iraq. This occurred just after the White House made strong accusations that U.S. soldiers in Iraq are being killed by Iranian-supplied munitions.
Administration officials said that the […]

By Mark Perry, Bitterlemons, February 8, 2007
Before Judas’ betrayal, the Lydian historian Pausanius tells us, there was Antenor’s ancient treason. Antenor was the soldier who convinced King Priam to open his city’s gates before his departed enemy. Antenor’s honey-tongued words of assurance have come down to us through the epics: of how a wooden horse […]

The Secretary of State calls Hamas a “resistance movement”
Last September, McClatchy Newspapers foreign affairs correspondent, Warren Strobel, was asked whether the second Bush administration could still keep its stories straight. During the first administration there had — at least among Washington journalists — been “an awestruck admiration” for the administration’s ability to stay “on message.” But […]

By Mark Perry, January 27, 2007
Writing in the Washington Post on January 20, Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt joins the growing chorus of critics of former President Jimmy Carter, whose book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has created a minor public firestorm. It is not as if we need to hear more. Carter’s book — “Palestine: […]

In a speech in London this week (prior to addressing the Baker commission in Washington), British prime minister, Tony Blair, laid out his “whole Middle East” strategy. Blair asserted that addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be at “the core” of such a strategy yet British diplomats are reported as being deeply frustrated that the White […]