Chess Pieces Move: Bush Admin Officials Plan to Meet with Iranian and Syrian Reps in Neighborhood “Block Party”

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I’m getting a lot of “official statements” from U.S. Senators in my in-box all of a sudden commenting on the Bush administration’s change of heart regarding attending official meetings with representatives from the governments of Iran and Syria.

Hezbollah Plays Nationalism Card

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This short International Herald Tribune piece by the Nixon Center’s Alexis Debat and Ghassan Schbley got me thinking about the simultaneously turbulent centrifugal and centripetal forces between transnational Islamist movements and state structures in the Middle East It’s a very short, clever article — but here is the part with which I partly disagree and…

The Terrorism Surge: Measuring the Iraq Effect

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My colleagues Peter Bergen, who moonlights at CNN’s terrorism analyst and is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and Paul Cruickshank, a Research Fellow at NYU’s Center on Law and Security and frequent collaborator with New America foreign policy projects, have a great Mother Jones cover story piece out measuring the impact that…