Pierre's Middle East Issues Blog

The populist crusader: Mike Huckabee comes across as the most sincere, affable and populist of the 2008 presidential contenders for the American presidency. But his rhetoric tends to soar much ... Read More

Blasted hope: Benazir Bhutto, who had twice been Pakistan's prime minister and was campaigning for a third try, was assassinated in Rawalpindi on Dec. 27, two months after returning home ... Read More

David Lamb spent 25 years roaming the world as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times (and collecting eight Pulitzer-Prize nominations along the way). He spent three of those ... Read More

It's not been a good year for the Middle East: continuing genocide in Sudan's Darfur region, another humanitarian crisis in Somalia, 4 million Iraqi refugees meandering inside and outside their ... Read More

Sudan and Saudi Arabia are in a forgiving mood. Late last month I wrote here of the story of the "Qatif girl," as she's known in Saudi Arabia--the woman who was ... Read More

They're skeptical: Unidentified tribal leaders in Khowst Province, Afghanistan, listen to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates this month. Gates was visiting Afghanistan to evaluate rising violence levels, and ... Read More

Too old for terrorism: Libya's Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is all smiles now that western leaders are his pals again. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.) Before Osama bin Laden, there was Muammar el-Qaddafi--or Khadafy, ... Read More

The finger pointing was swift and sanguine in the aftermath of terror's latest toll, this one from twin blasts in Algiers, the Algerian capital, one targeting the Algerian Constitutional Council, ... Read More

When the Middle East scores seven of the New York Times' "53 Places to Go in 2008," for frills and fun no less, including such current and former members of ... Read More

An old story: An Iraqi policeman investigates the scene of a shooting in Baghdad, where one Iraqi was shot after foreign private security guards opened fire on his car, back ... Read More

Iran's triad: A framed Ayatollah Khomeini radiates over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as he delivers a speech in April at the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, reasserting Iran's right to nuclear ... Read More

Imagine what it must be like for a man like Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois and one of the major candidates running for the 2008 presidency, to ... Read More