August 11 - Shuffling the Deck in Iraq's Parliament; Is Saudi Arabia Behind the Islamic State and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi?; Could Humanitarian Aid to Eastern Ukraine Lead to a Peace Deal?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the wrangling in the Iraqi parliament where Iraq’s president has chosen a new Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to replace Nouri Maliki, but he appears to be reluctant to relinquish his post in spite of mounting pressure from the U.S. and much of the world for him to step down. Joining us is Flynt Leverett who served on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration until resigning over Middle East policy and the conduct of the war on terror. We discuss Iran’s role in the shuffling of the deck in Baghdad and whether Iran still wants the state of Iraq to stay together, given that is appears to be falling apart, and the extent to which Iran would have influence over a rump oil-rich Shiite state in the south.

Part 2

Then we speak with the leading scholar and public voice on Islam, Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl who is a Distinguished Professor in Islamic Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is also the Chair of the Islamic Studies Program. He is the author of “The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists” and the new book out soon, “Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari’ah in the Modern Age”.  We get a profile on who the self-proclaimed Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is, and who might be behind the rise of this street thug into the leader of the so-called Islamic State that controls much of Iraq and Syria and threatens the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south.

Part 3

Then finally we assess the possibility that a joint humanitarian effort by Russia, Ukraine and the E.U. led by the International Red Cross, could be the beginning of a way out of the spiraling violence in Eastern Ukraine where major cities are under siege and millions are displaced. Alexander Motyl, a professor of political science at Rutgers University and author of “The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919-1929”, joins us to discuss whether fears that Putin was planning to use a humanitarian convoy as a pretext for an invasion of Easter Ukraine have been put to rest by this apparent deal.