| November 25, 2007 | - In Annapolis, Maryland, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice convened a meeting of Middle Eastern leaders, excluding Iran and Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. “We must not view Annapolis as a failure,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said before the summit started. “Nothing good will come out of it,” said Riham Abu Khater, a 17-year-old Gazan woman attending a protest march. “Good will only come from the language of fighting, and from force.” Hamas pledged to pack more explosives in its homemade rockets, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “Participation in this summit is an indication of the lack of intelligence of some so-called politicians.”
| Source 1:
Daily Star
Source 2:
Haaretz
Source 3:
Haaretz
Source 4:
Jerusalem Post
|
| January 9, 2007 | - In the Persian Gulf, the USS Newport News, an American nuclear submarine, collided with the Mogamigawa, a Japanese
oil tanker.
| Source:
Boston Globe
|
| August 3, 2006 | -
Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah boasted that his forces were inflicting “maximum casualties” and warned Israel that if it “bombed our capital Beirut, we will bomb the capital of your usurping entity”; he also called on his fellow Arab leaders to “be men for just one day.”
| Source 1:
NY Times
Source 2:
CNN
|
| August 1, 2006 | -
English Prime Minister Tony Blair said there was an “arc of extremism” stretching across the Middle East that could be defeated, he proposed, by “an alliance of moderation.”
| Source:
BBC
|
| February 19, 2006 | - The U.S. Army was using a computer game called “Tactical Iraqi” to teach Marines how to interpret Iraqis' gestures; “Tactical Pashto” and “Tactical Levantine” are in development.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 10, 2006 | - Paul Pillar, the CIA's former national intelligence officer for the Middle East, published an article claiming that the Bush Administration had "cherry-picked" intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. "Intelligence was misused publicly," he wrote, "to justify decisions already made."
| Source:
Democracy Now!
|
| February 4, 2006 | - The IAEA voted to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council because of Iran's nuclear program; Venezuela, Cuba, and Syria voted against the measure. Prior to the vote, Egypt proposed to make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone, but that proposal was rejected by the United States because it would interfere with Israel's weapons program.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 1, 2006 | - Telesur, the Latin American
TV network backed by the Venezuelan government, announced that it would collaborate with the Middle Eastern TV network Al Jazeera.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| January 31, 2006 | - During the State of the Union address President Bush announced that America is "addicted to oil" and vowed to replace "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025." Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said that this promise was not meant to be taken literally. "This," he said, "was purely an example."
| Source 1:
The White House
Source 2:
Knight Ridder
|
| August 29, 2005 | - A draft of the Iraqi constitution was completed, with a referendum scheduled for October. Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa called the charter "a recipe for chaos."
| Source:
BBC News
|
| August 20, 2005 | - Peter Schoomaker, the Army's top general, revealed that the United States was developing a plan to keep at least 100,000 soldiers in Iraq through 2009. Senator Chuck Hagel (R., Nebr.) called the plan "complete folly." "It would further destabilize the Middle East," he said. "It would give Iran more influence, it would hurt Israel, it would put our allies over there in Saudi Arabia and Jordan in a terrible position."
| Source 1:
AP
Source 2:
AP
|
| May 20, 2005 | - Newspapers published photos of Saddam Hussein standing in his underwear, shuffling around, and sleeping. The photos may violate the Geneva Convention, which prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity,” and some people questioned whether the photos could incite further violence in the Middle East. “I don't think a photo inspires murders,” said President Bush. Hussein threatened to sue.
| Source 1:
BBC News
Source 2:
Seattle PI
|
| March 31, 2005 | - The U.S. Army's Psychological Operations group was developing propaganda science fiction comic books for distribution in the Middle East.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 2, 2005 | - George Bush said he would "confront" Middle Eastern nations in the name of peace.
| Source:
CNN
|
| December 23, 2004 | -
Tony Blair toured the Middle East, and called for a peace summit in London. The United States and Israel both told him to cut it out.
| Source:
Scotsman.com
|
| November 22, 2003 | -
Muslims across the Middle East celebrated Jerusalem Day by demonstrating and chanting, "Death to Bush! Death to Sharon!"
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| November 21, 2003 | - An animal-rights group fed ham to 70,000 sheep that were destined to be eaten in the Middle East.
| Source:
Agence France-Presse
|
| February 26, 2002 | -
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared that “the state of Israel is not collapsing.” A professor at the University of Maryland released a study showing that during the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians from 1995 to 2000, incidents of terrorism in the Middle East declined every year; by 1999 the region had the second-lowest level of such incidents in the world.
| |
| August 21, 2001 | -
Donald Rumsfeld, the American secretary of defense, explained that his much-ballyhooed “revolution in military affairs” was not a revolution at all but was instead a “transformation”: “When they see that word,” he explained, seeking to comfort critics in Congress and among the troops, “there's a tendency to think that you go from this to something different.” In fact, he said, you can do something rather modest, like improve communications, which “could be characterized as transformed or transformational.” President George W. Bush declared that peace would come to the Middle East only after everyone stopped fighting.
| |
| March 6, 2001 | - Secretary of State Colin Powell traveled to the Middle East and proposed easing the ten-year-old sanctions on Iraq that disproportionately harm innocent civilians.
| |
| March 6, 2001 | -
Indonesia's president Abdurrahman Wahid was sightseeing in the Middle East and north Africa while machete-wielding Dayak tribesmen in Borneo continued to hunt down Madurese settlers and chop off their heads.
| |
| October 3, 2000 | - Political violence continued in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Indonesia, and elsewhere.
| |
| July 25, 2000 | -
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat failed to meet President Bill Clinton's deadline for making peace in the Middle East; Clinton declared the summit over and flew to Okinawa for a meeting of the G8, the world's seven richest industrialized countries plus Russia, where the leaders issued a strongly worded statement decrying the alarming lack of Internet access in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.
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