A CLUTCH of archaeologists sits in a freshly upholstered auditorium near the Roman amphitheatre in Leptis Magna to learn how to use a global positioning system, something restricted to the security forces under Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. “Take a picture, then note the co-ordinates,” says an instructor, showing slides of the ruins (pictured above). The country […]
As President Barak Obama resettles in the Oval Office and casts his gaze again beyond US politics, he may well be reminded that few eyes were on the ball when the Arab uprisings appeared to erupt suddenly in the spring of 2011, catching pundits and politicians by surprise, and re-positioning Washington’s Middle East policies. Today, […]
The Arab Spring that swept away dictatorships across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 unnerved many in the Chinese leadership. Liu Yuan, one of the boldest and most ambitious generals in China’s People’s Liberation Army, was particularly shaken by what he identified as a fatal weakness of Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi: his son. Until […]
Political Islam came to life after the Arab defeat of June 1967, with a new alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat. Read Here – Le Monde
It is not true at all that all Arab armies are merely private militias at the beck and call of the rulers. Some of them are real national armies and quite a few have turned out to be more nationalistic than others during the Arab Spring. Although it has been reported that the deposed Tunisian […]
The UAE is one of several Gulf nations using its oil wealth to find new ways to build a position of substantial influence in the world. For many years, the ambitions of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations were directed internally as they struggled with the mammoth task of building the infrastructure and social systems […]
As Egypt struggles to revive an economy battered by last year’s uprising against Hosni Mubarak, private lawsuits are attempting to overturn the sale of state assets during his rule. The court actions present the new government with a dilemma: It’s trying to attract foreign investment while addressing the demands of a population that stages protests […]
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 […]
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 […]
Some months after the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, I sat at lunch with the aging Hosni Mubarak. He was then 76 years old and hard of hearing but soon to “run” for the presidency for a fifth time in 2005. The four times previous, there had been no election at […]
looking beyond borders 