Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
If faced with the choice between a genuinely representative new Iraqi government that shows itself to be resistant to Washington's policy commands and an unrepresentative but compliant one, many in Washington will be tempted by the latter. But haven't we already discovered in other Middle East countries the problems with that choice?
The Bush administration's new "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)," announced in December, is wise in some places, in need of small fixes in other places, and dangerously radical in still others.
It may be time to admit that there will never in fact be a common European foreign and security policy. Long before the crisis over Iraq erupted, momentum towards the creation of such a policy was quietly ebbing away.
The neoconservatives of the Bush administration have remained surprisingly determined on going to war with Iraq, despite the British insistence on UN involvement and Saddam Hussein's agreement to weapons inspections. Anatol Lieven considers what they hope to gain.
The Carnegie Endowment hosted a panel discussion on a pre-election assessment report by the National Democratic Institute, the International foundation for Election Systems, and the International Republican Institute.
The inflammation of US nationalism since 11th September has blinded it to the potential strategic disaster of a split with Europe. If an American strike against Iraq were to go badly wrong, the resulting international discord could spell the end of the cultural entity known as "the west".