My friend Warren Coats, author of One Currency for Bosnia: Creating the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina, hosted a spring party yesterday, and I was reminded of his expertise in advising governments in war torn or besieged states how to create “hard currencies”.
The Washington Note will be live streaming a half day forum Monday morning, May 17th, focusing on the war in Afghanistan in the wake of President Karzai’s visit to DC. The schedule follows below but some of the headliners include James K.
Yesterday, the New America Foundation and Foreign Policy hosted a great program focusing on the state of play in Middle East peace restart efforts and launching the new “Middle East Channel” at FP (which is a joint project of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University and the New America Foundation’s…
A friend in Thailand just sent me this link to the geographic parameters of the brewing dangerous conflict in Bangkok. TWN has a lot of friends and readers in Thailand and hope that everyone stays safe.
My friend and former New America Foundation colleague Paul Cruickshank has been at the forefront of CNN’s investigative journalism on the nuts and bolts of Islamic terrorism. In one of Cruickshank’s recent shows that he did with CNN’s Nic Robertson, they showed how devastating a small bomb on a plane could be.
If you are a Middle East policy junkie, then you are most likely already acquainted with “The Middle East Channel” at Foreign Policy.
This is a guest note by Barbara Slavin, freqent TWN contributor and author of Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S. and the Twisted Path to Confrontation. Slavin has visited Iran seven times. Clinton, Karzai Define Down Kandahar: “A Process, not an Operation” Experienced politicians are experts at downplaying expectations.
Maybe Newsweek‘s Ramin Setoodeh meant to stir up the controversy he did about gays being unbelievable in straight entertainment roles, and maybe he didn’t. But the topic has been busted open, and he and others should use this as a learning moment.
One of my frustrations with the global justice community has been a general aversion to thinking through and articulating clear road maps to secure human rights advancements in a way that can stand up to cost/benefit assessments of other contending policy goals.
This is a guest note by Dan Kervick, a regular reader and commenter at The Washington Note. Reaction to Aaron David Miller’s recent pessimistic piece on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has raised calls for outside-the-box thinking as the only alternative to despair and endless conflict in the Middle East.
