Middle East Articles

Ali al-Khawahir is a 24-year-old Saudi. Ten years ago, when he was 14, Ali stabbed a friend of his during a quarrel the two were having. Unfortunately for Ali’s friend – and as we will see Ali too – Ali stabbed him in the spine which left the friend paralyzed. This tragic but otherwise unimportant event matters to us because this week a Saudi court ordered that Ali be surgically paralyzed as punishment for his crime, committed ten years ago.

The perversity of the ruling, so apparent that is hardly need be explained, highlights the injustice of the Saudi legal system, and gives us cause to pause for a brief second and evaluate our relationship with Saudi Arabia.

The Obama Administration has faced difficult and complicated issues in determining how the United States should respond to the vicious civil war that has engulfed Syria for more than two years.  Few governments on the planet are less deserving of US support than the secular Ba’athist regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. In addition to the brutal and ongoing atrocities it has committed against its own citizens, apparently including the use of chemical weapons, the Assad regime has actively facilitated Iran’s efforts to train and arm the terrorist group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Yet the main opposition to the Assad regime—a loose coalition of Sunni factions known as the Free Syrian Army—has increasingly come to be dominated by militant jihadists.

This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

Many analyses have been made about Iran's strategic and geopolitical role in the Syrian regime, but not enough attention has been paid to the crucial and changing economic relations between the two countries. By analyzing Iran-Syria relations through this prism, one can shed light on the more nuanced, unconventional, and complicated aspects of Iran's role in Syria. 

Critics and audiences agree: Ben Affleck has done it again. With its numerous award nominations and victories, including last night's Best Picture, Argo will surely join Gone Baby Gone and The Town as an Affleck-directed box-office success, and rightfully so. In Argo (based on Joshuah Bearman’s 2007 article in Wired, which itself is about the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis), classic movie elements are strung together to weave a story that leaves the viewer hostage to the film’s suspense.