Conflicts Forum

Alastair Crooke
Article first published on The Washington Quarterly, June 2010
In his commendably candid interview with Time in January 2010, President Barack Obama noted that managing politics in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict “is just really hard.” The president, however, might well have been speaking about the Middle East as a whole. It is not just the […]

Alastair Crooke
Article first published on The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times
June 3, 2010
Beirut, Lebanon
“This is language that we have not heard since the time of Gamal Abdul Nasser.” Thus wrote the influential chief editor of Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, referring to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s fiery response to the Israeli […]

Henry Siegman
Report published by the Norwegian Peace-Building Centre
The continued expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank seems to have finally locked in the permanence of Israel’s colonial project. Israel has crossed the threshold from the Middle East’s only democracy to the only “apartheid regime” in the Western world. But outside intervention may offer the […]

Conflicts Forum’s latest Monograph, by Aisling Byrne
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By Mark Perry, Bitter Lemons, April 30, 2009
The wry and oft-repeated saying among senior American military officers is always good for a laugh: “no matter what the question,” they claim, “the answer is always Clausewitz.” Unlike many war theoreticians, Prussian Major General Carl von Clausewitz actually served in the military–fighting Napoleon and spending time in […]

By Alastair Crooke, Asia Times, January 14, 2009
As Europeans watch the humanitarian disaster in Gaza unfold on nightly news bulletins, many may wonder why this crisis seems to have left their governments groping in such apparent fumbling disarray. The answer is that it is the result of policies pulling in opposite directions - of an […]