I’m very pleased to be a new co-blogger at The Moderate Voice. Joe has decided to grant me a spot on the staff as a way of bringing another angle of foreign policy analysis here to TMV. These are big shoes to fill, as the current crew of bloggers seems to do a very good job of debating and analyzing current international issues. Nonetheless, I hope to add a new perspective to these ongoing discussions and I look forward to working with the other bloggers and discussing ideas with readers.
As a bit of an introduction, I am a student at Brown University studying international relations and Middle Eastern politics. I spent last year in the Middle East, studying Arabic at the University of Jordan and later at a private institute in Damascus. I currently write a blog on American foreign policy, with a particular focus on US relations with the Arab world. A lot of what I write about on Foreign Policy Watch is related to the effectiveness of particular policies. What should the Bush administration be doing to end the ongoing standoff in Lebanon? Is it time to engage with Syria? If so, how? Should we be supporting the Islamists or the government forces in the current Somali conflict? Is the Bush administration doing enough to encourage reform in Egypt?
For my first post, I figured I’d jump right in with a piece on Iranian politics, where there have been some interesting developments in the past few weeks. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the most powerful figure in the country’s political hierarchy, has taken a very public step into Iranian politics by criticizing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the nation’s controversial and outspoken president. In a post on Foreign Policy Watch, I explain the reasons for Khamenei’s unexpected rebuke and attempt to lay out how the Bush administration should respond to these recent developments.