In my running commentary on Syria over the past year and more, I have occasionally had recourse to mention, and sometimes to criticize, not just mainstream press accounts of events, but sometimes also specific commentators. One of these has been David Ignatius of the Washington Post. His column in yesterday’s paper marks a new low, […]

When this blog was formed (or re-formed) some months ago, part of its name included “Jewcentricity” for a reason. For those who may not know, this is the title of a book I wrote in 2009.  There will be no second edition of the book, because the first edition attracted not a single major review […]

There has not been a day since February 11, 2011, that Egyptian politics have ceased to surprise the world. Ever since the afternoon that Hosni Mubarak fell, the world’s most seasoned political analysts have struggled to make sense out of events. No one foresaw the fast-paced dynamic of the political game we have witnessed in […]

Yesterday there were warnings that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) was about to default on its prepaid pension obligations. And today, sure enough, the USPS announced that it could not meet today’s obligations, and also that it would not meet those pending six months hence. For loyal and long time readers of The American Interest, […]

It’s another Monday, and another day just flat out made for a slash-and-burn romp through the newspapers. Today’s papers once again evoked in me that old graveyard laugh. I’m not becoming a curmudgeon, I promise. It’s just that my ruminations have begun to float free of my conscious control. In other words, I just can’t […]

At least twice in my comments on Syria over the past several months I have dismissed the possibility that the Syrian opposition could summon the ability to storm the Assad regime’s “palace” and overthrow the regime by direct force. I have argued instead that the pressure mounted by the opposition was far more likely to […]

The past several days have elapsed without my having made a comment here on matters Middle Eastern. That does not mean nothing has been going on, but nothing has happened of such a dramatic nature as to focus any extended comment. Reality does not always pour forth with punctuation marks, so that it seems to […]

The news has come that Manaf Tlass, an intimate Republican Guard friend of Bashir al-Assad, has defected to Turkey. As the press is saying, this is the most significant inner-circle defection since the beginning of the Syrian uprising. It could well be a sign that the inner circle is cracking in the belief that Assad […]

On Wednesday the New York Times ran a fascinating piece authored by Thomas Erdbrink, dateline Tehran, under the title “Iran’s Vice President Makes Anti-Semitic Speech at Forum.” The twelve-paragraph article describes the remarks of Iranian Vice President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi at a United Nations-sponsored conference on the illegal drug trade. For those who have not seen […]

All the newspapers reported the Syrian downing of a Turkish military jet yesterday off the Syrian coast. And all the papers as well as the electronic media have reported the joint Syrian–Turkish effort to locate the pilots, and the various statements of the two sides about what happened and who is to blame for it.There […]