The National (UAE)

On May 12, a few days after street fighting erupted in Beirut, I drove to Majd al Anjar, a Sunni stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa, close to the Syrian border, where gunmen were still blocking the motorway from Beirut to Damascus. At the edge of town, several hundred men with automatic rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers, pistols and hand grenades stood before earthen barriers and fires. Some wore masks. There was nobody in command – this was a mob, not a militia. The men… more

Besides the obvious propaganda, the local news broadcasts extensive reports from the Palestinian territories and Israel, with exceptionally graphic images from Gaza of mutilated bodies and weeping families after raids by Israel. “Iran spends a lot of money and attention on its propaganda machine,” said Afshin Molavi, a political analyst on Iran at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC. Mr Molavi said the anti-Israeli and anti-US propaganda is actually aimed at winning over the Arab and Muslim world.

“Iran broadcasts news about Arabs, uses Arabic-speaking… more

If the 20th century really began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in August 1914, which set in motion the start of a series of intrastate wars so brutal they killed tens of millions, then surely the beginning of this century was announced by the attacks of September 11, the harbinger of a new kind of war waged with spectacular acts of terrorism by non-state groups that seem likely to be a defining feature of the century to come.

On the beautiful morning of September 11, 2001… more

...In the Financial Times, Anatol Lieven argued that the British government was in a position to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran. "All that it needs to do is make clear to the US administration, initially in private but in public if necessary, that the consequence of an attack would be complete British military withdrawal, not only from Iraq but from Afghanistan as well. "Israel must have US acquiescence to launch an attack since by far the easiest route for one lies… more

The US government is pressing the new Pakistani civilian administration to back off efforts to remove Pervez Musharraf from the presidency.

But if the United States truly wanted to shore up democracy and help fight terrorism inside Pakistan, it would pursue the exactly opposite policy: the United States should publicly back the immediate removal of Mr Musharraf. A new public opinion survey shows why.

More than the ailing economy, the survey, conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow in collaboration with the… more

...“Politics is going to come in here very, very fast,” said Frida Berrigan, an organiser with the grassroots group Witness Against Torture, which is also seeking to close Guantanamo. 

“Does Congress have a mandate to back the supreme court in the middle of this election season?” she asked. “I think there’s going to be a lot of roadblocks in the way of enacting what the supreme court has judged and determined.

“What does it mean for the men of Guantanamo?” Ms Berrigan… more

The most important long-term strategic challenge facing the Gulf Cooperation Council is not the threat of Islamic extremism or the rise of Iran -- it is the continuing economic decline of the United States.

Ever since 1980, when Jimmy Carter, then president, first publicly committed the United States to use military force to defend the free flow of oil from the Middle East, the United States has been the region’s unquestioned hegemon. And ever since the GCC was formed in 1981,… more

“Where are you from, my friend?” the merchant in Sharm Al-Sheikh asks me. I have been in enough bazaars in the Middle East to know the routine: I state my nationality (American), he makes a light joke about Rambo or Hollywood (avoiding politics), and then proceeds to hawk his goods to me at triple the going price.

But this time I took a different tack: “Iranian,” I said, citing my other nationality. “Iran?” the merchant responded, somewhat confused and pleasantly surprised.… more

Five years after a war allegedly launched to liberate Iraq’s Shiite majority, American forces have been bombing Shiite neighbourhoods in Basra and Baghdad while their snipers and tanks remain on the ground in places like Sadr City.

Iraq seems to have emerged from the worst phase of its civil war, but the victorious Shiite factions have turned their arms on one another in a fight over the spoils, battling for political power in advance of the upcoming provincial elections.

But as the… more

...Washington would “protect” the world’s natural resources, not necessarily for American consumption but to give the US military a franchise for flexing its muscle.

“The power to protect by its nature is the power to threaten,” as the American analyst Michael Lind puts it in his masterful book, The American Way of Strategy.

Thus the US, which relies on the Gulf for less than a third of its oil supplies – the sham of US “dependence” on Middle East oil is a… more