Center for a New American Security

So a typical cycle for this blogger is to get annoyed by some criticism, write something snarky and mischievous, and then get all Presbyterian about it and feel guilty for having written something snarky and mischievous. I wrote something snarky and mischievous about Dan Drezner yesterday and now feel kinda bad about it because it's really not cricket to write such things.

Today we have a special interview with NPR's Deborah Amos. Deb is a longtime reader of this blog and an even longer-time student and observer of the Arabic-speaking world.

I just found this via Arabist. This is Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middle East correspondent for the New York Times (and the Boston Globe and Washington Post before that), speaking at my alma mater.

No wonder we have no peace in the Middle East. George Mitchell spends all his time with Hillary Clinton discussing the plotlines of Dan Brown novels while Jeff Feltman stares off into the distance, bored and wishing he were back in Lebanon.

Robert Kagan dismisses this "war of necessity"/"war of choice" nonsense and then nails it:

...that Obama's big speech in Cairo today is a bigger deal in the Western world than it is in the Arabic-speaking and Islamic worlds? The speech is only the #2 story on al-Jazeera right now, behind the clash between Palestinian security forces and Hamas in Qalqilya.

Pity the Project on Middle East Democracy, a well-meaning group of young(ish) scholars and advocates dedicated to pressing U.S. policy in the Middle East to support for democratic reforms. They have a new paper on Egypt written by a longtime Egypt analyst which is probably worth the time of the president's staff in advance of his trip there.

Matt Duss responds to my post from yesterday:

I met up with an old commander of mine last night for a beer, and while I was waiting at the bar, I got caught up on some of the reading I had missed over the weekend. Included in that reading was this article in the Financial Times on Islam, the Middle East and democracy.

Unless my alma mater has suddenly ceased to be the stingiest institution in the Levant, I'm thinking the American University of Beirut wasn't the one that paid for Christopher Hitchens to travel to Beirut. The word on the street is that Hitchens was in Beirut as part of a junket paid for by Lebanon's March 14th coalition and its stateside lobby.