Muslims and Liberals

Myriad East-West interactions renewing religious and secular values

Why can’t Iran get the feel for nukes?

THE TALKS TO revive the Iran nuclear deal will resume “soon …within an acceptable period of time,” Joseph Borrell has announced. The deal was about curbing Iran’s nuclear program in return for lifting U.S. and U.N. sanctions on that country. Borrell, the European Union foreign policy chief, had been coordinating negotiations between the last Iranian...

Kurdish fiasco ‘America first’ cause

WHEN PATRICK HENRY vowed to “live free or die,” he couldn’t have known about today’s Kurdish dilemma in Iraq. Two weeks ago 92 percent of Kurdish voters in northern Iraq voted in a referendum to create an independent state, consisting of the three Iraqi provinces where they’re in a majority. Unfortunately for them, the outcome...

No ‘cakewalk’ to Pyongyang, please

ON WEDNESDAY I was about to head out to a seminar on cyber security at Wilson Center in Washington when I peeked into the Internet to check the latest news. “U.S. quietly plans to occupy North Korea after war,” a banner headline in London’s The Sun newspaper screamed at me. I remembered that President Trump...

Bravo, Trump!

This is a first for me: supporting an action of President Trump. I applaud his order tonight to strike Syrian military installations with dozens of Tomahawks. It’s a highly moral and humane undertaking whose strategic consequences are likely to be far-reaching. I hope that America will finally get rid of the ghastliest and most repugnant...

Did CIA try to bump off Erdogan?

RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN has upped the ante in his row with the Obama administration, which has heated up since last month’s failed coup in Turkey. The Turkish president now has jumped onto the lap of America’s geopolitical rival, Vladimir Putin. Erdogan’s meeting Tuesday with his Russian counterpart in a czarist palace outside St. Petersburg has opened...

Iran deal: Break it and you own it

America can start a conflict with Iran and throw a “Mission Accomplished” party after a likely initial victory. But only Iran could end the war. With its network of activists and militias across the “Shiite Crescent,” the Islamic Republic could set the Middle East on fire, which probably wouldn’t stop before consuming many of America’s interests and endangering its hegemony in Muslim west Asia.

Declare Middle East nuke-free

Persian Gulf monarchies are petrified by the anticipated Iran nuclear deal, being negotiated in Geneva. Last week Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates threatened to try to acquire nuclear weapons technology if they didn’t get one of two things from the Iran deal. One, they wanted the Islamic Republic’s uranium enrichment program shut down...

Barhain atop democratic ‘volcano’

By Mustafa Malik  For the United States, the Bahraini uprising is more worrisome than most others now swirling in the Middle East and North Africa. America’s stakes in Bahrain was underscored to me this past Jan. 13 by a researcher in Manama, the Bahraini capital. “The Al Khalifa rulers are sitting on a volcano,” said...