"The unprecedented combination of political chaos, cross-cutting military confrontations, and strategic contradictions in northern Syria reached a record-setting point two days ago. That was when Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, and the Department of Defense (DoD) said, 'we call on all armed actors to stand down and take appropriate measures to deconflict and open channels of communication.'"

"The failed military coup in Turkey and the country’s many links with key regional actors in Syria, Russia, Iran, and NATO clarify how difficult it has become to achieve political solutions to individual conflicts, because local, national, regional, and global interests of any single party do not line up nicely in a coherent and clear balance sheet of desirables and undesirables..."

"The difference between the sensible and superficial approaches to tackling the scourge of terrorism and other forms of violent extremism by groups such as “Islamic State” (ISIS) was as clear as possible last week, in two efforts by the US government and the United Nations secretary general, Ban-Ki moon. For all those puzzled people around the world who ask what we must do to defeat ISIS and others like it, I suggest taking half an hour to read and really ponder the proposals offered by the UN secretary-general..."

"The main problem is that foreign military actions tend to achieve exactly the opposite of the intended goals. Military assaults against terror groups, resistance movements, and just plain old civilian demonstrators or non-violent rebels — whether carried out by local governments or foreign powers, or both — tend to harden and expand the resolve of those who challenge the states in question..."

An audio recording of a public talk by Rami Khouri, MEI Non-Resident Senior Fellow; Senior Fellow, Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy, American University of Beirut; Syndicated Columnist.

"So here is this week’s brainteaser about the endearing world of American foreign policy in the Middle East. What should we make of the juxtaposition of three dimensions of U.S. policy on display today — the U.S. president’s sensible statement that the real threat to Arab states, including across the Gulf, is as much from their internal political and socio-economic stresses as it is from external sources like Iran; the defense secretary’s acknowledgment that Al-Qaeda is expanding its areas of control in Yemen in the midst of the current domestic and regional wars there; and, the active American support for the war effort in Yemen that seems to promote the first two problems?"

"The more the Global War On Terror continues, the greater seems to be the expansion and impact of the very terror groups it seeks to defeat, with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra being the most recent examples. During the last few months that I have spent in the United States, I have wondered, with growing perplexity, why there is so little discussion here of why the GWOT seems only to have sparked the continued birth and expansion of international militant and terror groups across the Arab-African-Asian region."

"It is exasperating to listen to American officials pontificate about events in the Middle East and offer reasonable sounding proposals to resolve the area’s problems, when those same officials and the entire political power structure they represent refuse to acknowledge that they have played a major role in creating or expanding those problems. This is why it is astounding to watch the United States now lead the military assault against the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) by using the same techniques that contributed in a major way to the birth and growth of the militant Islamist ideology that forms the core of ISIS and its criminal deeds."

"One of the surprising aspects of following U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East from within the United States, as I have done for several months now on an extended visit, is the peculiar gap between ordinary citizens’ sentiments and the fact that the United States is actively militarily engaged in several countries in the region. This dangerous trend means that the American president — it does not matter which party he is from, because they both act similarly irresponsibly abroad — can continue to use the country’s enormous capabilities to wage war around the world at will."