Human Rights Watch is calling on Iraq and Turkey to open their borders in Syria’s northeast to allow the passage of some 10,000 Syrian refugees, caught in the desert without proper sanitation. Aljazeera English reports on the closed Iraqi border at Qa’im. The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government fears that some of the Syrians seeking to escape […]
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Syria
Romney’s Five Wars
Mitt Romney’s speech at VMI on foreign policy has been widely condemned as vague and lacking in substance, sort of like the man who gave it. But the speech is also full of suggestions and criticisms of the Obama administration that are simply not realistic. The speech is Romney’s “Mission Impossible,” only without the cool […]
Top Seven Errors President Obama has made on the Middle East
Yesterday I explored the errors and fantasies in Gov. Mitt Romney’s WSJ op-ed on the Middle East. Here I will briefly go over the mistakes that the Obama administration has made in the region. Unlike the proposed blunders of Romney, I have to say, most of these are errors of omission or of an abundance […]
Did Bashar al-Assad Betray Qaddafi?
The polemicists of the fringe left and the far right who depict the Baathist regime in Syria as a beleagured victim of Western plotting may have to retool their noise machines. It turns out that the authoritarian government of Bashar joined with France to destroy Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. An intelligence official for the Libyan rebels […]
Top Ten Likely Consequences of Muslim anti-US Embassy Riots
1. Tourism in Egypt and Tunisia, the economies of which heavily depend on it, is likely to take a nosedive this fall. It is a shame, because Tunisia had been hoping for a near return to 2010 levels of 7 million visitors this year. And Egypt’s tourism was up 16% over the previous year, though […]
The West Will Have to Compromise on Syria (Schmidt)
Søren Schmidt writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: Syria is neither Egypt nor Libya – and the conflict can therefore not be solved as it was in Egypt and Libya respectively. The conflict in Syria worsens with each day that passes, and by now more than 20,000 people have been killed. At the […]
A Tale of Two Insurrections: Syria, Iraq, and American Security
Both Iraq and Syria saw massive violence on Sunday. But there is a key difference between the two, and therein lies a cautionary tale for Syria. In Iraq, guerrillas of the so-called “Islamic State of Iraq,” an al-Qaeda affiliate, set off car bombs in almost every single important town and city in the country, leaving […]
Putin, Pussy Riot, Hooliganism and the Syrian Bloodbath
The sentencing of members of the Russian punk rock band, Pussy Riot, to two years in prison for a protest song they sang in an Eastern Orthodox cathedral against Vladimir Putin, now president of the Russian Federation, has blackened the name of the second Russian republic abroad in a way its support for the murderous […]
Syria and the New Great Divide in the Greater Middle East
With news of a series of bombings and attacks in Iraq, of kidnappings and reprisals in Lebanon, and an ongoing Civil War in Syria, anyone who looks at the map of the Greater Middle East cannot fail to see a new Great Divide. The Great Divide has three dimensions. 1. First, it pits the Shanghai […]