Middle East and North Africa

We were wrong about Saddam Hussein. By ‘we’ I don’t mean the international intelligence community and I don’t mean the governments of the Coalition of the Willing. I mean the public and the media who, to this day, believe and say that what was found in Iraq after the fall of Saddam’s Baathist regime showed Saddam was not a threat to the international society.

Surprise is surely the last thing we should feel at Foreign Secretary William Hague, reporting on Monday that there was increasing evidence that President Assad was using chemical weapons on his own people.

The crisis in Syria is on-going and so is the debate about the West’s options to help end the bloodshed. Those in favour of a more pro-active policy are regularly confronted with a variety of arguments against intervention.

Human rights are universal, but they are yet to be universalised. Transparent sovereignty is the answer. Whilst being a legalistic term that tends to evoke groans, apprehensive of impending, inevitable boredom, the word ‘sovereignty’ is central to any debate on whether humanitarian intervention in the internal affairs of a State is appropriate or justifiable.

Executive Director Julie Lenarz published in the Times of Israel on the ongoing misconceptions the West has regarding the civil war in Syria. Two and a half years after the war kicked off in Syria the debate rages on over whether the West should get involved or stay out of the brutal conflict.

By Jacob Sharpe – Senior Fellow 18th June 2013 Iran is a country that adheres very closely to the democratic principle of ‘one man, one vote’. Perhaps a little too closely, in fact, inasmuch as that one man is Supreme ...

Two experiences stand out from my recent visit to the Kurdistan Region in Iraq: meeting refugees fleeing Syria at the Domiz refugee camp; and seeing a weeping son uncovering the body of his father, Mohammed Serspi, murdered by Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s.

Who could have foreseen that Libya, within just one year of Muammar Gaddafi’s death, would join the community of democratic nations? Virtually everyone predicted that the Islamist tide would sweep through Tripoli as it had done through Tunis and Cairo. But it was not to be. Instead, the Libyan people made fools of us all.

The U.S. will become the world's largest producer of oil before 2020, a net oil exporter by 2030, and will achieve energy self-sufficiency by 2035. In light of pending energy self-sufficiency, a change in U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East should not come as a surprise

The original, modest protest over the redevelopment of Istanbul’s Gezi Park has – largely due to a foolishly heavy-handed police response – mushroomed into a much wider manifestation of discontent.