Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Kyrgyzstan is really coming to a turning point. Any further deterioration in its political conditions will justifiably earn it the label of an authoritarian state. Many already consider it to be one, although most would grant that it is the softest of the region's authoritarian regimes.
Prime Minister Sharon's analogy of George W. Bush's current policies to the abandonment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 is warped and ill-advised. But, the prime minister had a point. There exists a much more apt analogy which- not surprisingly- does go back to 1938-39. It is not Chamberlain and the Nazis, but the British and the publication of the pro-Arab 1939 White Paper on Palestine.
Discussion on the Israel-Palestinian conflict often focuses more on the politics of the conflict than on the terrible human cost. The Carnegie Endowment hosted a Werner Kaspar and Kathleen Newland to discuss the humanitarian consequences of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As Kosovo demonstrates (and as Lebanon and Somalia showed more brutally), the most dangerous threats come from the need to occupy areas containing hostile populations; these dangers are even greater when the areas concerned are cities. This is the kind of future warfare on which the U.S. Army should be concentrating its new weapons development, its tactical thinking, and its moral preparation.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War have fundamentally changed the strategic balance in the Middle East and have had a profound impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Carnegie's Shlomo Avineri argues that four facets can be discerned from current Russian attitudes toward the Arab-Israeli conflict that inform Russian policy.