Dr. Charles G. Cogan

As an inveterate reader of the New York Times, I woke up on the morning of May 18th to learn that planning for an attack on Iran has been done already. And the implication was that planning has been done between the United States and Israel. How else are we...

"Sarko the American," as Nicolas Sarkozy was known rather pejoratively in France (such a nickname, however, going down rather well in the United States), conducted himself with calmness and grace after his close, but decisive, defeat in the French presidential election of May 6th.

The moment Sarkozy saw that...

As the one who was in charge of the CIA side of the attempted hostage rescue mission in Iran in 1980, what jumps out at me from a reading of the two-part piece in Time ("The Last Days of Osama bin Laden") is the feeling that Barack...

All Israeli withdrawals are unilateral; otherwise the Arabs would never agree with them. Thus it was with the unilateral withdrawal from Southern Lebanon and the subsequent unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Despite the fears and the heartaches that Arab rockets from Gaza have since caused, few if any Israelis...

The Obama Administration did not budge this time. During the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accompanied by the din of the AIPAC conference in Washington -- where half of the members of Congress turned up to hear "Bibi" speak on March 5 -- President Obama stuck to his...

In one sense, it is gratifying to see an under-leveraged Benjamin Netanyahu return to Washington to plead the case for U.S. help in an Israeli attack on Iran. After twice flouting the president of the United States, once over the extension of the freeze on settlements in the occupied West...

Upwards of 85 percent of the world's Muslim population are Sunni, and this helps explain the firm stand of the Arab League against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Al-Assad is an Alawite, and it is this ethnic group -- some 12 percent of the Syrian

Baraka is a prized quality in the leaders of the world. The late King Hassan II of Morocco seemed to possess it, having survived two assassination attempts, in the latter of which his plane was raked by 107 bullets (though not of the armor-piercing variety), and yet the pilot,...

The rhetoric toward war is increasing between the United States and Iran. The prospect of further sanctions against Iran, coupled with the Iranian promise that, if this happens, Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz, has upped the ante. American troops are out of Iraq, which frees up at...

Eight and a half years after a U.S. president caricatured the office by appearing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit get-up to announce "Mission Accomplished," the Iraq War has finally ended for American troops. A war begun under a number of flawed pretexts -- from non-existent weapons of...

In footage aired on December 9, Newt Gingrich told the Jewish Channel that the Palestinians were an "invented people":

Remember, there was no Palestine as a state -- (it was) part of the Ottoman Empire. I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in...

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is not without throwing some strong language around. "Get to the damn table," he intoned before the centrist Saban Center in Washington on December 2. By this he meant both Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis are quite willing to join the table of negotiations as...

It's become known as "Memo-gate": a memorandum submitted by a circuitous route to Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The memo was delivered during the second week of May 2011, a few days after the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama bin Laden....

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly, in a non-binding Resolution (No. 181), recommended splitting what then constituted the Palestine Mandate into two parts, with an accompanying map: 55 percent going to a Jewish state and 44 percent going to an Arab state. These were to be "independent...

In an unguarded ("live-mic-ed") conversation in the margins of the G-20 Summit, President Sarkozy said he couldn't bear Benjamin Netanyahu any longer and went on to describe him as a "liar." President Obama replied, "You are fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often...

This paraphrase from a song by the Beatles characterizes the important role played by the tiny Gulf sheikdom of Qatar (pop. 1.6 million) in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's late and unlamented dictator.

It was known that Qatar had supplied to the Libyan rebels diplomatic support, air support, weapons,...

Tunisia is a small Arab country (pop. 10 million) that has never really counted much in the Arab picture. Under the guidance of its charismatic founding father, Habib Bourguiba, whose physiognomy resembled more that of the ancient Carthaginians than the later Arabs, Tunisia became the most liberal of Arab states,...

Make no mistake about it: the Gaddafi takedown, which ended with the holed-up dictator, à la Saddam Hussein, shot in the neck and chest, would not have been possible without the action of France's hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

On the strength of the Libyan rebels having been endorsed to Sarkozy...

I have often been bemused by the tendency of many Americans not to vote their interest. They keep sending to the Congress the guardians of the rich as they sideline themselves into peripheral issues such as gay rights and abortion, and they exhibit reflexively their distrust of government, inherited from...

A few days ago, an Arab leader described to me the U.S. Government's policy in the Middle East as "delusional." A well-placed friend of mine in Washington described President Obama's September 21 speech to the United Nations General Assembly as "obscene."

I decided to look...