For Your Weekend Reading

It's a three-day holiday weekend here in the US, and I'll be traveling on Monday so posts will resume Tuesday; so some weekend reading as usual:

• First, a couple of house plugs for MEI events: on June 1, in an event held at the Carnegie Endowment, a panel on "After the Visits: What Next for Middle East Peace?" with M.J. Rosenberg of Israel Policy Forum, Ghaith al-Omari of the American Task Force for Palestine, and Geoffrey Aronson of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Then on June 10, following the Lebanese elections, a discussion of The 2009 Lebanon Elections: Outcomes and Implications with Graeme Bannerman of MEI and Bilal Saab of Brookings (a former MEI intern, by the way). RSVP for either at the link. Podcasts and/or transcripts usually go up soon after the events.
  

• Mossad is said to be upset about the Defense Ministry deciding to close down a unit headed by Iran expert Uri Lubnani and tasked with studying Iran; the timing does seem odd. Also in Haaretz, Yossi Melman says Israel's military option against Iran "has died" following the Obama-Netanyahu meeting.
  

• A Tony Cordesman PowerPoint-style analysis of the Afghan-Pakistan wars from CSIS (PDF). Lots of graphs and maps. If you like the sort of things Tony puts out, well, this is the sort of thing you'll like.
  

• The Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) has a new report: Looking Forward: An Integrated Strategy for Supporting Democracy and Human Rights in Egypt. (PDF)

• A RAND report, called Dangerous but Not Omnipotent, urging that "US Strategy Should Avoid Inflating Iran's Role in Middle East Instability, Exploit Constraints on Iranian Power and Seek Areas of Engagement," Press summary at the link; full document here (PDF).
  

• Al-Masry Al-Youm continues to be your key source for all swine flu, all the time, with a piece (English here and Arabic here) Killer quote: "The US Health Department announced for the second time that the number of infected people with the virus may be 100,000 people." But WHO only says 10,000 worldwide, and even this sentence in the article doesn't justify the headline "US Health Department Expects 100,000 to be infected with swine flu." I wish they'd link to that: I'm still not seeing any "Bring out your dead!" carts around here.
  

• For continuing English-language coverage of the Lebanese elections (besides, of course, The Daily Star and other papers), the blog Qifa Nabki continues to provide good, solid commentary with enough background for the non-Lebanese to follow.