Category: General

— Steve Clemons

Via FrumForum, I ran across a surreal Bundeshwehr performance of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” as the send off for recently resigned German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. I’m speechless. Well, nearly.

There are more than sixty of leading young activists from revolts and revolutions throughout the Middle East at the 6th Annual Al Jazeera Forum. I am attending this fascinating meeting as a guest of Al Jazeera. Turkey Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu just landed in Doha to speak at the meeting tomorrow.

I recorded a few minutes of comments outlining my concerns over the Libya No-Fly Zone debate. In short, a no-fly zone is a high cost, low return strategy that doesn’t necessarily create a military tipping point in favor of the Libyan opposition.

(Steve Clemons & Wadah Khanfar speak at TED 2011 Long Beach; photo credit: Mohamed Nanabhay) The quality of comments have improved dramatically during the period I and my team have been serving as moderators. I am going to test out releasing the reins again and see how this goes.

This is a guest note by Oliver Lough, who serves as an editor at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU). For some members of the international community, Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections of September 2010 were, among other things, an extended exercise in expectations management.

This is a guest note by Salman Al-Rashid, a Master’s student at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and an intern with the New America Foundation’s Middle East Task Force.

According to a survey published on Monday by the BBC World Service, Iran is viewed as the country with the most-negative influence in the world. It’s not hard to see why. Iran’s nuclear program is the subject of much controversy and anxiety in the United States and Europe.

US Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder just gave an on-the-record State Department conference call readout of NATO meetings on Libya and what capacity NATO might have on hand for various contingencies there. I tried but failed to get a question in, and the subject I would have raised was not covered in the call.

Fareed Zakaria has a piece in this morning’s Washington Post titled “America’s Grim Budget Outlook.” But his argument is less about budget cutting than the investment deficit America’s future faces compared with other periods of its history.