Israel SitRep: March 4, 2024
Today’s Issue: Missile Fired From Lebanon Toward Israel Kills One, Wounds Nine | In Overnight West Bank Raids, IDF Destroys Terrorist’s Home, Makes Arrests, Discovers Explosives Charges | In Two-Week...
Alawites
Iran’s Slow Boil
The clerical regime in Tehran has held the streets. It remains to be seen, however, if the strategies employed to keep the ayatollahs afloat will prevail. When Mahsa Amini, a young Sunni Kurdish-Iranian girl, died on September 16 in the custody of the morality police, nationwide demonstrations erupted, often with young women and girls on the frontlines.
Op-eds
Biden, Congress Should Defend Terrorism Sanctions Imposed on Iran
Memos
Sanctions Target War Profiteer Working for Assad’s Brother
The Treasury Department imposed sanctions today on Syrian war profiteer Khodr Ali Taher and 11 of his companies – part of the fourth set of designations since the Caesar Act went into effect this past...
Policy Briefs
The Syrian Front
Discussing America’s stake in the Middle East has increasingly become a shell game where our “interests” can quickly disappear depending on the changing sentiments of the president. The trajectory...
Op-eds
Strategic Geography of the Middle East
With the end of the Cold War the United States lost a sound understanding of the strategic geography of the Middle East. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, US strategy focused, correctly, on histori...
Op-eds
The U.S. Should Clarify Its Position on Third-Party Participation in Syrian Reconstruction
Forces fighting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russian air power, have all but...
Policy Briefs
American Policy in Lebanon Isn’t Policy. It’s Poetry.
The commander of Lebanon’s Armed Forces (LAF), General Joseph Aoun, was in Washington on an official ...
Op-eds
Hezbollah Calls the Shots in Iran’s Syria Policy
President Donald Trump is reportedly about to extend a terrorism designation to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in its entirety. The IRGC is both the dominant force inside I...
Op-eds
Perfect Partners
When he won the election, Donald Trump—along with his national security adviser Michael Flynn, his all-purpose counselor Stephen Bannon, and, perhaps, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner—wa...
Op-eds
Qatar is worst in the region on counterterrorism, but other Gulf monarchies are not off the hook
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly ...
Op-eds
The Face-Off
Donald Trump has promised a foreign policy of muscular retrenchment, in which a better-resourced U.S. military intimidates our enemies without serving as a global cop. More than any pr...
Op-eds
The sorrow and the pity in Syria
Over the last five years, Syria has been descending into a hell on Earth. Over the last four months, the lowest depths of the...
Op-eds
Muslims in America
One of the most striking features of the British cemetery at Gallipoli is the attention given to honoring the diversity of the dead. Final farewells from loved ones carved upon stone plaques line...
Op-eds
Gulf Monarchies Condemned Orlando Attack While Promoting Hate Preachers: Government-Sponsored Cleric
America’s Gulf allies talk a good game against terrorism. They ...
Op-eds
A death in Damascus, a funeral in Beirut
Five years ago, during the hopefully named Arab Spring, Syrians staged peaceful protests against the ruling dynasty that had long oppressed them. President Bashar al Assad responded brutally: In...
Op-eds
Done Deal?
All administrations are short-sighted. Even the brightest, most reflective people can develop acute tunnel vision when they join the paper-pushing, crisis-a-minute senior ranks of the National Se...
Op-eds
Hate Preachers on Qatar Campus: Obama Gives Qatar Undeserved A+ on Fighting Incitement
“Kill the infidels... Count them in number and do not spare one.” Blatant religious incitement of this sort feels like such a caricature of radical Is...
Op-eds
Hezbollah’s Growing Threat Against U.S. National Security Interests in the Middle East
Download the full testimony here. ...
Legislative Testimonies
Bystanders to genocide
It’s surprising how time slips away: Five years ago next month, President Obama proclaimed a “responsibility to act” when American “interests and values are at stake.&rdqu...