I recently had the pleasure of leading a Great Decision’s group meeting that covered Augustus Norton’s chapter on the Middle East Realignment, AKA “Arab Spring: Where are We Now”? Our group had an excellent discussion and, as could be expected, jumped around to numerous subtopics within this wide ranging theme. We tried to go through […]
Way back in February I expanded on a report in the Christian Science Monitor that suggested al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) had set up shop against the Assad regime, in Syria. Writing both here and for The American Spectator, I joined the chorus of analysts, academics and pundits who urged caution against arming Syrian rebels – precisely because it’s unthinkable to equip battle-hardened […]
By Alexander Corbeil The International Sphere and the Domestic Situation in America We are now witnessing a bloody and drawn own out plan of regime change by civil war in Syria. To put it plainly it’s government overthrow on the cheap for the United States, both in political and financial terms. It is true that […]
The following was taken from Jspace.com. The article was written by Jspace Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Rob Lattin, who also blogs about Israeli and Middle Eastern foreign policy for Foreign Policy Blogs. With all of the turmoil and uncertainty going on in the Middle East right now, the state of Israeli-Turkish relations has largely been under-reported and under-analyzed. While […]
After the shooting down of a Turkish F4, supposedly unarmed, last Friday, Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, recently declared that Turkey considers Syria as a “clear and present danger.” However, he went further and claimed that “we [Turkey] won’t be trapped into a war of provocation, but we won’t be silent and do nothing […]
By Majid Rafizadeh The world may have been able to pretend that it was not aware of the genocides taking place in Germany or in Rwanda in the 1990s. However, considering all the communication technology that exists today–international news outlets, social media, YouTube, etc.–in the future we won’t be able to claim that we didn’t […]
Fatou Bensouda, newly sworn in as prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, is getting a lot of advice. Much of it is well-meaning. As the first African and the first woman to hold the post, Bensouda has rightly inspired much good feeling. For those who disagreed with her predecessor, one of her assets is, apparently, […]
When the International Criminal Court finally came into existence in 2002, it was lauded as a serious step towards universal justice and accountability for the worst international crimes. Ten years later, some of that excitement has worn off. Nowhere has that been more the case than Africa, the continent that has so far been the […]
What to watch this weekend: the US golf open in San Francisco, the Euro 2012, the third game of the NBA Finals–Go Heat–or the latest Ridley Scott’s Prometheus? In fact the place to look and observe should be the Mediterranean. This weekend the world will be watching, especially in the US and Europe, the outcomes […]
We are now deep into year two of the Arab world convulsions. Not one country across the North African-Middle East arc is settled. Even where it sounds quiet it is not. Two years from the first cry of freedom, very few things are how the outside world predicted. As Egyptians vote for their president in […]
Admittedly, it’s not all doom and gloom coming out of Russia. I mean, look on the bright side. Chief Federal Prosecutor Aleksandr I. Bastrykin is really sorry for driving an opposition journalist into the woods, threatening to kill him, and joking that he himself would lead the investigation into the death. Bastrykin even offered the man (now […]
The following piece was originally published in YOUR MIDDLE EAST. Reprinted with Permission by Eliot Benman I was standing in the kitchen of an old Damascene house in the Christian quarter of Bab Touma when a figure burst through the door, brandishing a gun and crying “Kill the Islamists, kill the Islamists!” He pointed the gun […]
Syrian refugees sit outside their tents at Reyhanli refugee camp in Hatay province on the Turkish-Syrian border in April. Turkey’s prime minister recently warned that ‘Syria must be aware that in the event of a repetition of border violations, Turkey’s stance will not be the same.’ A fifth of Turkish military’s top brass is under […]
Bashar-al Assad’s all too deadly caricature as an ass. The Syrian Army lying in wait. Night-vision shots of night-time attacks. A bombed out car. An anti-Qaeda revolutionary insurgent who insists that al Qaeda’s presence in Syria, the popular narrative nowadays, is more tall-tale than truth; that the attacks roiling the country have been mainly perpetrated […]
Posted by contributor Andres Santamaria. The sanctions imposed by the West on Syria are proving to have an overwhelming affect on the people within this unsteady country, writes Jonathan Saul for Reuters. Sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States mainly target the assets and finances of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime but are […]