The friends of our enemies
Westerners, too, are waging a ‘War on the West’
The Sunday Times
Came the revolution
My political orientation has evolved slowly over decades. With one exception: I became anti-Soviet and anti-Communist overnight. More quickly than that, actually. The year was 1972. I wa...
Op-eds
The Summit That Wasn’t
I’d venture to guess that most of what you heard about President Obama’s summit last week was wrong. To start, it wasn’t a “summit.” That term, coined by Winston Chu...
Op-eds
Hamas’s Benefactors: A Network of Terror
Chairman Ros-Lehtinen, Chairman Poe, Ranking Member Deutch, Ranking Member Sherman, and distinguished members of these subcommittees, on behalf of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, I tha...
Congressional Testimonies
Hamas’s Benefactors: A Network of Terror
Chairman Ros-Lehtinen, Chairman Poe, Ranking Member Deutch, Ranking Member Sherman, and distinguished members of these subcommittees, on behalf of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, I thank yo...
Congressional Testimonies
Paper Trail Leads to Damascus
In December 2010, the New York Times' Robert F. Worth wrote an article about the newspaper Al-Akhbar, "the most dynamic and daring in Lebanon, and perhaps anywhere in the Arab world." The pa...
Op-eds
Zimbabwe Zigzags Onto Another Rough Patch
The ongoing stand-off in Zimbabwe between incumbent President Robert Mugabe and the main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, shows how much the political landscape can shift back and forth in t...
Op-eds
Iran-Backed Senior IMU Commander Captured in Afghan North
Coalition and Afghan forces captured a senior facilitator for the al Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan [IMU] with links to Iran during a raid yesterday in the northern Afghan province o...
Op-eds
Taliban commander linked to al Qaeda, Iran, killed in US strike in western Afghanistan
Coalition special operations forces and Afghan commandos have killed a wanted Taliban commander with links to al Qaeda and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, during a raid on a train...
Op-eds
Return of the Somali Pirates
By Dr. Peter Pham After maintaining a relatively low profile since the end of the monsoon season two months ago, Somali pirates literally shot their way back into the headlines...
Op-eds
The Strategic Challenge of Somalia’s Al-Shabaab
Since emerging from an era of colonialism under Italy and Britain, Somalia has passed through military dictatorship, famine, and civil war to regional fragmentation. In the modern period, America...
Op-eds
Pirates of Somalia: The Curse of the Failed State
On April 4, MY Le Ponant, an 850-ton three-masted luxury sailing yacht owned by CMA CGM S.A., a French firm headed by Lebanese-born businessman Jacques Saadé that is the third-largest container shipping company in the world, was en route from the Seychelles to the Mediterranean when it was seized in international waters in the Gulf of Aden by Somali pirates. A week later, after the owners had paid a ransom reported to be around $2 million, Le Ponant docked at the port of Eyl in the semi-autonomous northeastern region of Puntland and the 30 crew members – twenty-two Frenchmen, six Filipinos, a Cameroonian, and a Ukrainian – were released. French forces, however, tracked the attackers to the nearby fishing village of Jariban where helicopter-borne commandos disabled the escape vehicle with sniper fire and seized six of what is thought to have been an original band of twelve fugitives. The six prisoners were flown to Paris where they were arraigned before a French court on charges of theft, hijacking, and hostage-taking.