Middle East

Ahmadinejad Dinner’s Main Course Is All Image

By Frederick Kempe

The questions I had scribbled in my notebook, going into what would become a three-hour dinner meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, were key to knowing how dangerous he might be. 1) How much power does he have? 2) Is he as deranged as his rhetoric would suggest? Behind the first question was whether he […]

Iraq Debate: Strategy Not Tactics

The current debate on Iraq is wrongly “focused on the tactics of the moment” rather than the long-term strategic questions, retired Marine General James L. Jones told a full house at the Atlantic Council and a C-SPAN audience. The way forward requires thinking “beyond the next election.” Download the PDF

Independent Commision on the Security Forces of Iraq

Retired Marine General James Jones, Chairman of the Atlantic Council, chaired the Committee that produced this report assessing Iraq’s national police force. The report’s overall assessment said “the Iraqi armed forces – Army, Special Forces, Navy, and Air Force – are increasingly effective and are capable of assuming greater responsibility for the internal security of […]

Iraq War Squabbling Squanders an Opportunity

By Frederick Kempe

September offers a unique opportunity for a turning point on Iraq. OK, before you roll your eyes and stop reading, we aren’t talking about a turning point IN Iraq — that will take more than President George W. Bush’s Labor Day outing in Anbar Province or the rat-a-tat of expert reports and congressional testimony over […]

U.S. Challenges and Choices in the Gulf: Saudi Arabia

The September 11th terrorist attacks and their aftermath have not altered Saudi Arabia’s fundamental importance in the international arena nor its importance to the United States. Saudi Arabia remains the source of much of the world’s oil reserves, the site of the holiest places in Islam, and the crossroad of strategic lines of communication between […]

Libya and the United States: The Next Steps

Over the past several years, the Atlantic Council’s International Security Program has taken a position that, in due course, the United States’ adversarial relationships with countries, such as Libya, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and North Korea will eventually be restructured both in recognition of changes in the nature or policies of these difficult regimes, and in […]