Several years ago, Farid Ghadry​--a Syrian exile activist--published a piece in the Middle East Quarterly looking at what political trends lay beneath the surface of Syria's Baathist dictatorship. He identified the discussions groups that arose during the short-lived "Damascus Spring" and hypothesized that they represented the proto-political parties which might develop.

I can never figure out why people want to write about things they haven’t read. Wait, let me amend that. I can never figure out why people who wish to be taken seriously write about things they haven’t read. Here’s an especially fragrant post entitled “Ignore the Hawks” from our compatriots over at CATO@Liberty.

U.S. diplomats are pressing for the victory of the candidate who presided over Iraq at its nadir.

The rapid ticking of the Iran nuclear clock also marks an increasingly dark hour for the United States and its closest allies and partners, because it coincides with a third clock that Pollack did not imagine in 2004: the timetable of retreat set in motion by Barack Obama.

Review of The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, by Kanan Makiya.

There has been a significant amount of progress in Iraq since General Petraeus took over.

A review of Eric Davis's Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity.

Syria has always been among the Middle East's most repressive regimes. Any hope that Bashar al-Assad would usher in reform were naïve to begin with, the stuff of diplomats' fantasies. The question of what might come after Assad is a difficult one for American diplomats who have spent far more time trying to engage Assad and his functionaries than in reaching out to the Syrian opposition.