My new column at Truthdig.com is just out: “Obama’s 2010 Successes and Failures in the Middle East”. Excerpt: ‘ As 2010 dawned, President Barack Obama had four big issues on his plate regarding the Middle East. These were Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Iran, and Afghanistan. The year has been as unkind to him on those issues as […]
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Arab World
Iraq’s al-Maliki Rebuffed on Incomplete Cabinet
Al-Hayat writes in Arabic that prospective Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki faced severe opposition on Monday to his insistence on announcing the formation of a government without naming all the cabinet members. Among the parties opposed to this step was the Iraqiya, the Kurdistan Alliance, and the Sadr Movement. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court issued a ruling […]
Iraq Arrests Dozens in Terror Sweep, Offers Help to Iran
Iraqi authorities are going for the trifecta. They are finally forming a new government, nine months after the March parliamentary elections, to be headed by incumbent Nuri al-Maliki at the head of a Shiite-Kurdish coalition. They have finally gotten UN sanctions on Iraq, implemented after the 1990 occupation of Kuwait, lifted. And they are increasingly […]
Egypt: Israel’s Nukes Destabilizing to Region (Wikileaks)
Whenever any US official says that Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program is destabilizing the Middle East by posing a proliferation problem, I wince. A civilian enrichment program is not a proliferation issue, since only the construction of a nuclear warhead would violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The NPT explicitly allows countries to close the fuel […]
Visser: Spin-Doctors and the Changing Nature of Imperial Power in Iraq
Reidar Visser writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: Treaties, Acronyms and Spin-Doctors: The Changing Nature of Imperial Power in Iraq In the 1920s, during the early days of the Iraqi monarchy, a major bone of contention between King Faisal I and Britain concerned the definition of their bilateral relations. King Faisal objected strongly […]
Mubarak: W. Naive, controlled by Subordinates
We now have the full text of the May 19, 2009 cable giving background in preparation for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s visit to President Obama at the White House. This is the one where he said Iraq basically needs strong man rule. But the cable is full of other insights: 1. Mubarak boycotted the Bush […]
Can ‘Desperate Housewives’ Defeat al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia? Wikileaks
US consulate confirms what everybody already knows. Jeddah in Saudi Arabia has bipolar disorder. The Red Sea Port wears a sober puritan mien during the day, but at night turns into Party Central. While the US consulate seems to have taken a certain amount of satisfaction in the knowledge that the Saudi middle and upper […]
Egyptian Official: Israelis Might be Behind attacks by Sharks, which seem to be Beasts of Prey
Even shark attacks in the Middle East get caught up in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The fifth victim of a shark attack this week at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt’s Sinai, an elderly German woman, was killed this weekend. The governor of southern Sinai, Muhammad Abd al-Fadil Shosha, said that it is not unlikely that the […]
Dec. 6: Top Ten New Wikileaks on Greater Middle East
Here are this weekend’s top ten Wikileaks revelations for the Greater Middle East: The US and India wanted to slap United Nations sanctions on Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and his group, Jama’at al-Da’wa, for terrorism. But Pakistan asked China to block this move at the UN, and Beijing complied. The Jama`at is widely considered a front […]