Pelosi is traveling to Damascus next week. Five other lawmakers, including House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat. One Republican, Representative David Hobson of Ohio, is also on the trip. Bush Aide Perino Says Speaker Pelosi's Planned Syria Trip Is a `Bad Idea' A White House spokeswoman denounced the visit. A number of [...]

Risk-taking in Riyadh
Fri. Mar 30, 2007
The Forward, Editoria
As the Forward went to press this week, reports from a senior Israeli journalist currently in Riyadh — those words themselves bespeak a revolution in Arab-Israeli relations — indicate that Saudi Arabia is preparing to roll out an elaborate new peace proposal. Formulated in the course of [...]

Arab Unity and respect for the Arab nation were the overriding themes of the Arab League summit in Riyadh. Saudi diplomacy at the summit represents an important break with US policy in the region, designed as it is to pit "moderate" Arabs against "terrorist" Arabs. The Bush administration views Arabism as fascism, conjoint with Islamism in its evilness. [...]

Salim Abraham, a Syria journalist from Qamishli who worked for Associated Press in Damascus for years before winning a grant to attend the master's program at Columbia University's School of Journalism in 2005 and 2006, wrote this essay on Farid Ghadry. It is taken from his master's thesis, completed in the spring of 2006. Salim Abraham has recently [...]

I will be traveling for several days to give a talk in Florida. Here is a departing news roundup.
Ibrahim Hamidi, explains "Solana’s incentives to bring Syria back into Arab ranks and pry it away from Iran” (Trans. by mideastwire.com)
In the March 17 issue of al-Hayat Hamidi wrote: “If the recent war between Hezbollah and Israel last [...]

"A Response to Michael YoungBy Joshua LandisMarch 20, 2007Syria Comment  
Michael Young wrote an article in the Daily Star, "The blogosphere's foreign informant," taking issue with my post on Lebanon and making a number of accusations about me, the most damaging of which was the suggestion that I "intentionally" and "dishonestly" justified Michel Kilo's arrest. I will answer this [...]

Analysis of the Brammertz V Report: the on-going UN investigation into the murder of Rafiq al-Hariri, former Prime Minister of Lebanon
By t_desco

March 18, 2007, for Syria Comment

The new Brammertz report ("Brammertz V") merits a detailed analysis. I will also try to put it in the context of the previous reports.

My earlier posts on this blog [...]

Interview with Hizbullah's MP Nawar SahiliBy Hugh Macleod, March 2007 Published by Syria Comment 
As Lebanon and international players struggle to find a solution to the four month old political crisis in Beirut, British journalist Hugh Macleod spoke to Hezbollah MP Nawar Sahili about the roots of the dispute and the future of Hezbollah’s armed resistance.
In [...]

Ehsani2 – Syria Comment's "Mr. Economy" – initiated a discussion in the previous comment thread about Syrian Finance Minister's interview with Syria News in which he ran though some economic forecasts and proclaimed that the country's revenues were in danger. Ehsani answers questions on why he things that is so. It is an interesting discussion [...]

Abdullah Ghadawi, an Arab reporter in Damascus sent me the following interviews with Kurdish students at the University of Damascus on the topic of Kurdish rights, Kurdish nationalism, and their attitude toward US pressure on Syria and serving in the Syrian military. The students were preparing to go out onto the streets of Damascus to commemorate [...]