The former Colombian ambassador to the United States, Carolina Barco Isakson, noted that the nation has progressed significantly since the immensely violent drug-hub of two decades ago. 

Walt offered an admittedly “grim forecast” of the potential impact of Obama’s policies in a lecture titled “Doomed to Fail: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy.”

Team Iran, the current members of which are undersigned, has been monitoring developments in Iran and its relations with the rest of the world since December 2006. We find that the more one studies the diplomacy connected to Iran’s nuclear program, the more clearly one sees the danger of the situation. It is a game of chicken. The possibility looms that neither Iran nor its adversaries will swerve away at the last minute.

In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted at the end of September, only 11 percent of those polled believed that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should be the number one priority of the federal government.  These numbers have changed little since then.  However, a terrorist attack in the United States or a dramatic turn of events in Operation Enduring Freedom could quickly propel the Afghan War to the forefront of Americans’ minds.

President Obama has been jet-setting around the Middle East this week in an effort to convince Muslims that the United States doesn’t hate them. It’s no easy task, but, given his family background and reputation for reasoned rhetoric, he’s certainly the man for the job.

But there’s a problem. For all of Obama’s admirable accomplishments in foreign policy thus far, the man’s positions regarding torture and the legal framework of the War on Terror are nothing short of despicable. Maintaining the worst of Bush-era government secrecy and Big Brother intimidation techniques, our constitutional-scholar-in-chief has left many hopefully progressives scratching their heads.

On Friday President Obama released a video message aimed directly at the Iranian government and people on the occasion of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. In the message, Obama offers Iran a new beginning, and a new opportunity for dialogue. Such a message puts Iran’s hardliners in an awkward position. In the past, they could blame the US and the Bush administration for preventing a rapprochement, while now they look like the obstructionists if they do not show a willingness to engage.

Robert Malley, the program director for Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group in Washington, D.C., addressed a modest crowd inside Goldwin Smith’s Hollis E. Cornell auditorium yesterday evening.

Malley, who is widely regarded as an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, gave an insider’s perspective on the nature of the crisis and offered a uniquely anecdotal appraisal of the problems currently facing Israel, Palestine and the United States.

I wasn’t lucky enough to attend the inauguration of President Barack Obama in Washington, but that didn’t make the moment any less memorable. I traded a sea of admirers surrounded by neoclassical monuments for a cozy corner of Collegetown Bagels, where my eyes could wander from the television screen to the swirling snow beyond the café’s broad windows.

What I liked most about the inauguration was that it distracted me, if only for a moment, from thoughts of the thousand-plus Gazans killed since late December.

One of the most inspiring moments of the speech came when Obama spoke to the Muslim world, claiming that “we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” Nuance was finally back in Washington, and she looked sexy.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The re-emergence of two former Guantanamo Bay prisoners as al-Qaida terrorists in the past week won’t likely change U.S. policy on transfers to Saudi Arabia, the Pentagon said yesterday.

More than 100 Saudis have been repatriated from the U.S. military’s prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Saudi Arabia, where the government puts them through a rehabilitation program designed to encourage them to abandon Islamic extremism and reintegrate into civilian life.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — President Barack Obama’s administration will engage in “direct diplomacy” with Iran, the newly installed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said yesterday.

Not since before the 1979 Iranian revolution are U.S. officials believed to have conducted wide-ranging direct diplomacy with Iranian officials. But U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice warned that Iran must meet U.N. Security Council demands to suspend uranium enrichment before any talks on its nuclear program.