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 […]

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 […]

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
The first anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration as President of the United States came this week. The sharpest criticism of Obama’s first-year record on domestic and economic affairs came from the Nobel prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist, and Princeton professor Paul Krugman.
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Alastair Crooke
Whilst America has been absorbed by the Afghan election imbroglio, a less-noticed event slid into place in the Middle East. It is less dramatic than President Karzai’s near removal; but this event tilts the strategic balance: Turkey finally shrugged off its US straight-jacket; stared-past any beckoning EU membership, and has fixed its eyes toward […]

By Alastair Crooke
The country is emerging as a regional power. Is the West ready for that?
It was pure drama: The leaders of the United States, Britain, and France stepped onto the stage at the Pittsburgh Group of 20 meeting last week to unveil Western intelligence that showed that Iran had a second nuclear fuel enrichment […]

By Khalid Meshaal, June 25, 2009
On June 25, Khalid Meshaal, head of the Hamas Political Bureau gave a televised speech in Damascus and said, in part:
“… The Obama administration brought a change in rhetoric, but the question is what brought about this change. Even just the change on the level of the language, who effected […]