Never mind the troubles of the West; the rest have problems too. Look at Turkey. A couple of years ago, this was a nation with an Ottoman spring in its step. Tired of rejection by Europe, it decided to seize new opportunities in the East. The economy was booming and Ankara had made friends of […]
One of 70-odd rockets fired from Gaza into Israel this week hit a chicken coop, critically wounding two Thai migrant workers, innocent bystanders in a deadly game of brinkmanship. If it had killed children on the Israeli farm they work for, Israel and Gaza would probably be at war right now. Gaza’s Islamist rulers, Hamas, […]
The Iraq War might seem a thing of the past. But nearly ten years after combat began, the United States and its allies are using policies to address the Iranian nuclear challenge that are eerily similar to those it pursued in the run-up to Operation Enduring Freedom. Just as they did with Saddam Hussein, concerned […]
Hezbollah’s launching of a pilotless spy plane, which was shot down by Israel’s air force in the southern part of the country in early October, has been seen as more evidence that the Lebanese militia is preparing for war. Israelis assume that the drone was gathering visual intelligence to help Hezbollah in its goal of bombarding distant targets with long-range […]
As the networked world of the internet makes that which is distant seem very local, reality can be both distorted and amplified. The unfortunate “Innocence of Muslims” video served as a catalyst for the dissatisfaction felt by many toward American support of Arab nations. Yet this would not have occurred without the ability to spread […]
The emir of of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, has called for unity between Palestinian rivals Hamas and Fatah. Sheikh Hamad also denounced Israel’s policies and praised people of the Gaza Strip for standing up to it with “bare chests” during a one-day visit to the coastal enclave ruled by Hamas. The visit was the first by a head of state since Gaza fell under […]
When Israel was bombing Beirut during the war of 2006, a colleague and I sat drinking a beer after a long, hard day, listening to the explosions coming every few minutes from the southern suburbs. “Is this what it felt like to be somewhere in central Europe in the 1930s?” he mused. Comparisons are never exact, […]
While both Tehran and Washington were eager to deny a New York Times report which claimed they had agreed “in principle for the first time to one-on-one negotiation,” the covert war between the main camps in the Middle East moved to the Lebanese capital Beirut. Even more than a coup for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad […]
After the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where four Americans (including the U.S. ambassador) were killed, the debate about what went wrong has grown into a heated partisan debate. From it, a refrain of sorts has emerged: we should not “politicize” foreign policy. People of the left and of the right preach that talk of the Benghazi […]
Soft power tools have served Ankara well in the past, but the Turkish government is no longer in a position to distance itself from the region’s disputes if it envisages a leadership role. Read Here – Gulf News
