2012-08-28 By Richard Weitz In explaining their government’s December 2003 decision to support Operation Iraqi Freedom, Japanese officials cited the imperative of supporting their country’s bilateral military alliance with the United States. They considered the deployment of ground troops to the Iraqi theater as especially important in demonstrating Japan’s reliability to…
2012-08-27 By Richard Weitz Despite their deep historical, cultural, and economic ties, relations between Iraq and Syria have been characterized by mutual suspicion and hostility during much of the last half century. The two countries have distinctly different religious compositions. Most Syrians are Sunnis, while most Iraqis are Shiites. In practice,…
2012-08-26 by Robbin Laird The Pacific is a big place. It often either not understood and not reflected upon the scope and nature of the Pacific region. This is not the Mediterranean; this is not the Indian Ocean; this is not even the Atlantic. As Ed Timperlake put it clearly: The…
2012-08-26 By Richard Weitz Iraq and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which is not a GCC member, are destined to have intense ties due to the deep ethnic, geographic and religious connections between their citizens. Recent Jordanian-Iraqi relations are driven by issues regarding safe havens for terrorists, Iranian involvement in Iraqi…
2012-08-26 By Richard Weitz The 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States provided the Japanese government with an opportunity to reaffirm fidelity to the Japanese-U.S. alliance and Japan’s emerging role as an important international security actor. Immediately following the September 11, 2011 al-Qaeda suicide strikes, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s administration initiated…
2012-08-22 By Robbin Laird Throughout the competition for the USAF aircraft to supply a light attack aircraft to the Afghans, HB has focused on getting its trainer to grow into an attack aircraft. And among its bag of tricks has been a clear sense of the U.S. Company against a “foreign”…
2012-08-21 By Richard Weitz I have dealt with the bilateral relationship between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In this piece, I am going to deal with Iraq’s bilateral relationships with the other GCC states. Kuwait Historical factors make Iraq’s relations with GCC member Kuwait especially important. Kuwait’s territorial integrity and sovereignty were…
2012-08-19 By Richard Weitz The back-to-back visits of U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, in charge of that country’s military-industrial complex, to India last month demonstrate the heightened competition for India’s defense import market, currently the largest in the world. India accounted for…
