Research & Commentary Results

October 2015 marks the fourteenth month of formal U.S. military engagement in the struggle against the Islamic State (ISIS). The Obama administration was at first reluctant to engage U.S. military power in this struggle but then became more deliberate in its approach. U.S. involvement in the battlegrounds of Iraq and Syria has been evolving especially over the past year. This evolution has been defined and is in many ways limited by a strategy that emphasizes political change in Iraq and a broad coalition of states taking action against ISIS. 

While the international community focuses on the latest refugee crisis fomented by the cascading calamities now engulfing the Middle East, Gaza—home to the region’s first permanent refugees—offers a cautionary lesson about the costs of man-made hardship and instability.
 
The UN recently reported that the infant mortality rate in the Gaza Strip has increased for the first time since Israel occupied the area in June 1967, in part because of the draconian restrictions on Gaza trade imposed by Israel and Egypt during the last decade.

Read the full article in the September 2015 issue of The Ripon Forum.

It will be one year this September since the U.S. president declared the formation of an international coalition to ‘degrade and destroy’ ISIS.   After 6,000 air strikes, 9,000 targets struck, 10,000 fighters killed, and various battles undertaken in Iraq and Syria, the war is at a strategic stalemate.

This article was originally published by the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

On Saturday, local and international media outlets reported that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had formally announced his resignation from another organization he heads: the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Specifically the reports said Abbas had quit his role as chairman of the Executive Committee, the highest decision-making body in the PLO.

The 1,667-strong contingent of U.S. and international forces that make up the Multinational Force of Observers (MFO) in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula is in a tough spot. The ongoing failure of the Egyptian government’s war against the ISIS-led rebellion there has shredded the MFO’s mandate to monitor Egyptian and Israeli adherence to their peace treaty. Sinai’s descent into anarchy also puts outnumbered and outgunned U.S. troops in the only location other than Iraq that confronts ISIS in an active theater of war.

In the coming months, we can expect that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will no longer occupy the executive leadership position in the muqata, the interim Palestinian government headquarters in Ramallah. His age and his repeated insistence that he does not plan to run in new elections, as well as his most recent comments about his willingness to resign, point to this fact.

Twenty-five years ago, on August 7^th 1990, an American interagency team walked into an urgent meeting with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, not knowing what would happen. A week earlier Iraq had seized Kuwait. The Americans feared that the Iraqi Army might keep going, seizing the Saudi oil fields. As a result of decisions made at that August 7^th meeting, Iraq and terrorism have dominated American foreign policy for three decades and continue to do so.

If the hallmark of al-Qa‘ida was to execute simultaneous spectacular attacks to advance its strategic momentum, the month of Ramadan in June and July showed that the Islamic State (ISIS) is taking this tactic to a new level. Yet the extreme amounts of blood shed during the holy month will likely ultimately weaken ISIS, as tribes and other groups in Syria and Iraq, even more appalled by the organization’s barbarism, unite against it.

Predictions of a new Palestinian intifada in the occupied territories tend to accompany every breakdown in the diplomatic process, announcement of a new colonial expansion project, and Israeli violence against Palestinian life—such as the recent horrific murder of Palestinian infant Ali Dawabsheh by settler terrorists who set fire to his West Bank family home.

This article was first published on NPR’s Parallels blog.

It started so well. When Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, the United States swiftly cobbled together a broad coalition, unleashed a stunning new generation of air power and waged a lightning ground offensive that lasted all of four days. Iraqi troops were so desperate to quit that some surrendered to Western journalists armed only with notebooks.

This article was first published on the Huffington Post.

Read the full article on The National Interest.

For decades, most refugee crises followed a pattern: A war erupted, usually in a poor country, and beleaguered civilians staggered across the nearest border. The United Nations organized a response, rich nations footed the bill, and aid groups sent in workers to tend to the needy. Even in extreme cases, such as the mass exodus from Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s, the crisis was largely confined to the country at war and a few immediate neighbors.

For the first time in decades absolutely nothing is happening on the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic front. There is no agreed-upon structure for diplomatic engagement under U.S.—or anyone’s—guidance. Moreover, there is an international consensus that includes the United States that doubts, with good reason, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commitment to a two-state solution.

Since March 2011 Syria has gone through a traumatic process that has strained the ethnic, sectarian, and social fabric of the country—almost all that makes Syria a unified state with a people who share a common history, goals, and aspirations—to beyond the breaking point. Much of the country lies in ruins today, and its cultural heritage has been a deliberate casualty of the conflict from its earliest days.