Conflicts Forum

Written by Seyed Mohammad Marandi, University of Tehran, exclusively for Conflicts Forum.
Almost a year ago, in a well-remembered Friday prayer sermon delivered on February 4, 2011, Ayatollah Khamenei spoke at length, in Arabic, about the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. At the time, the Egyptian people were on the streets attempting to topple the Western-backed […]

Alastair Crooke
Article posted on Asia Times Online, 22 October 2011
This summer, a senior Saudi official told John Hannah [1], former United States vice president Dick Cheney’s former chief-of-staff, that from the outset of the Syrian upheaval in March, the king has believed that regime change in Syria would be highly beneficial to Saudi interests: […]

Sayyed Mohamed Marandi
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s interest in a stable Middle East is arguably greater than that of the United States—after all this is Iran’s neighborhood. For Iran to grow and prosper, it needs secure borders and stable neighbors. A poor and unstable Afghanistan, for example, inhibits trade and, potentially, increases the flow of […]

Alastair Crooke
Article posted on www.foreignpolicy.com
The ‘weakness’ of Europe — and also that of the US — in the Middle East is not essentially one of waning power and influence. Although the scent of decline always has had a powerful affect in this region, the root of this western debilitation consists of a more profound ailment: […]

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 […]

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 […]