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. Saudi Arabia, like many other states in the Arab world, is confronted with serious socioeconomic and political challenges.
I just hosted a media conference call for the Afghanistan Study Group with Republican California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA-46) on his views about America’s course in Afghanistan. I will be posting soon the audio clip from the short and fascinating call.
In a heart-moving gesture a few years after the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 in Japan, American children made 12,000 blue-eyed dolls and sent them to Japanese children. After that, 58 highly ornate, beautifully crafted Japanese “Friendship Dolls” were sent by Japanese children to American children.
Consider this an open thread. Have been scrambling a lot today upon returning to Washington. Big news in town is the debate over what to do in Libya — and what to regarding Japan. Both are enormous problems. The world is racing faster than we can process what is going on.
I spoke with Fareed Zakaria on CNN’s GPS yesterday morning about various possible political and economic impacts of the earthquake, tsunami and worsening nuclear crisis in Japan. Suffice it to say that the production quality of my video presence wasn’t awesome as I did this over Skype from my Doha Sheraton hotel room.
My friend Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and now back teaching at Princeton University, has written a compelling, passionate call for the US to immediately push for a UN Resolution to impose a no-fly zone over Libya.
The brutal killing of a family of five Israeli settlers, all from one family and including three children, in the West Bank is deeply disturbing. Little is known of the killer’s motivations at the moment — but no matter what they were, this was a despicable act that makes tensions between Palestinians and Israelis worse….
— 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.
