Iraq’s poorly led but far larger and more heavily armed government forces may eventually roll back the Sunni advance. For now they man a ragged defensive arc around the northern and western approaches to Baghdad that is 60-90km deep, writes The Economist
Ten years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq still suffers from the damage wrought in the overthrow of a dictator and the chaos that followed. Watch Here – Aljazeera
President Obama’s instincts about Iraq and Syria have been sound from the beginning: Greater U.S. engagement probably cannot make things better but certainly can make them worse, both for the people of the region and for our national interests. Read Here – Washington Post
The roots of the current violence go at least as far back as Iraq’s 2006-2007 civil war, which didn’t so much end as get put on hiatus. The spate of sectarian violence pitted the Shiite-majority government against Sunni militias and al-Qaeda in Iraq (a group from which ISIS emerged). The U.S. troop “surge” halted the […]
The Arabists never again came so close to implementing their vision of an American foreign policy sympathetic to Arab countries. Which isn’t to say they lost their influence in all ways. In what seems like a contradiction, Kermit Roosevelt was instrumental in the CIA-backed coup d’état that ousted the democratically elected leader of Iran, Muhammad […]
Pakistan’s military-to-military cooperation with Saudi Arabia goes back five decades. Between the 1960s and 1980s, tens of thousands of Pakistani troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia, working under Saudi command. Pakistani fighter pilots trained their first Saudi counterparts, and in 1969 flew jets that successfully repulsed incursions by Yemeni forces. Pakistani engineers built Saudi fortifications along its […]
America’s Gulf allies are unhappy with what they see as a milquetoast response to ongoing Iranian aggression and a betrayal of a commitment to remove Iran’s strongest ally—Bashar al Assad. Gulf leaders see a declining US military presence in the Gulf and feel there is a vacuum developing. These perceptions are incorrect, writes DB Des Roches Read […]
The more the United States turns out to be a fickle, unreliable ally of its longstanding friends in the Middle East—especially Saudi Arabia and Israel—the more the leaders of South Korea and Japan will worry whether they can rely on the United States’ defense umbrella. Read Here – The Diplomat
The Syrian civil war is like a massive tidal wave which swept across the country leaving behind widespread devastation. Buildings bear the physical marks of the damage. More than half of the Syrian population now live in poverty, says a study by the Syrian Centre for Policy Research, with the unemployment rate now near fifty […]
China has revolution envy. The world’s largest energy consumer wants a natural gas boom to match the speedy transformation in the U.S., where shale gas production more than quadrupled between 2007 and 2012. Read Here – Bloomberg
looking beyond borders 