Masoud Barzani is no longer forced to meet secretly with the Kurds in Turkey. He has become the leader and President of a "state" recognized by Ankara, one that seeks an exchange of interests with the latter on the basis of mutual respect, even if (...)
Leading the world is a complicated task, and not an easy one. This is what the US administration knows and the conclusion it has reached after 12 years of continuous wars. These wars have exhausted it financially and militarily, according to (...)
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has brought along a great number of issues to Washington. Some of them are domestic, such as partnership in governance, elections, armament, militias, relations with the Kurds and oil. Others are regional, such (...)
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has brought along a great number of issues to Washington. Some of them are domestic, such as partnership in governance, elections, armament, militias, relations with the Kurds and oil. Others are regional, such (...)
Demonizing others and portraying them as absolute evil in order to frighten people as a prelude to exterminating them or waging war against them, represents one of the main devices of McCarthyism. It was used by McCarthy in the 1950s in the United (...)
American-Iranian talks represent a major historical juncture in the international struggle over the Arab Gulf and the Levant. The two sides have reached this phase of détente in their crisis-laden relations, based on fact different from the virtual (...)
Ever since the Arab Spring began and before it became a tragedy, the United States has been trying to contain the changes it has produced and continues to produce, especially as those who were toppled had been its allies for decades. It used to (...)
"If there were not an Israel, [the United States] would have to invent one". It is with this expression that US Vice President Joe Biden addressed the J Street organization, the "left-wing" version of AIPAC, at its yearly conference in Washington (...)
The meetings of Iranian President Hassan Rohani with his French counterpart François Hollande and with British Prime Minister David Cameron, on the sidelines of United Nations General Assembly meetings, in addition to Obama's speech, have spread a (...)
During the precedent Cold War, the United States made use of three main countries in the Middle East, in order to confront the spread of Communism and Nationalism. Turkey represented the first line of defense in the face of the Soviet Union. The (...)
It is the same old game that always gets repeated: superpowers negotiating on behalf of weak countries and peoples; deciding their fate and the shape of their government; setting up the right president; removing one official and bringing in another; (...)
U.S. President Barack Obama has admitted that there is great and sharp division, both inside and outside the United States, over attacking Syria. However, Obama declined to say whether he was going to go ahead with the strike on Damascus or not, if (...)
The United States and its Western allies are still not confident about the ability of the armed Syrian opposition to assume power in Syria. Indeed, neither does its political structure allow this, nor does its Free Syrian Army (FSA) have the ability (...)
The Neoconservatives have awaken once again. They have launched a major media campaign to portray President Barack Obama as merely a weak-willed "colored" man, who does not befit America, its history and its pride – one who, if he ever takes a (...)
The United States had been reassured by the Muslim Brotherhood assuming power in Egypt and their plans. It had seemed to it at first that these plans were steadily moving forward to form the basis of the new Middle East it seeks to build. And there (...)
The Arabs are never very optimistic about the appearances of Senator John McCain. The former pilot has not laid down his arms, ever since the time he was bombing the Vietnamese people. Crimes against humanity in Vietnam made him stronger. He still (...)
Lebanon is the country of political settlements, and settlements between "constituents" have allowed for the establishment of the state. This has been its history ever since Greater Lebanon was declared, and it had the four districts joined to Mount (...)
Generally speaking, the peoples of the Middle East have not been able to reach the establishment of the nation-state and the consecration of the national principle. In fact, nationalist rhetoric has receded over the past few decades in favor of (...)
The "Arab Spring" has only been a front for the attempts of political Islam to rise to power with old programs, some of which date back to the 1920s, as in Egypt, and others trying to duplicate the experience of Turkey's Justice and Development (...)
They are killing poets, digging up their graves to make examples of them and tearing out their statues wherever they may find them. Yesterday it was Abul Ala Al-Maarri, today it is Abu Tammam. They are against any sliver of light in this Arab (...)
What has been dubbed the Islamic Awakening was met by a social awakening. The Islamic Awakening relied on interpreting religious scripture so as to agree with its political aspirations. It accepted elections and the recognized branches of government (...)
The United Nations (read: the United States) has removed Iraq from its obligations under Chapter VII, after it "fulfilled all its obligations" towards Kuwait, referring all unresolved issues between the two countries to Chapter VI. In other words, (...)
The fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I represented the end of political Islam's dream of a return to the caliphate. Nationalist political parties thus spread in the Arab World, which had just emerged from the tyranny of sultans who had (...)
Neoconservative theorist Daniel Pipes, the man behind the concept of "militant Islam", has advised the United States and the West not to allow one side to triumph over the other in the war taking place in Syria, so as to "let the forces of evil (...)
Can Erdogan contain the movement of the street and the changes of society, or is the Turkish model headed towards its end? This question poses itself in Istanbul's Taksim Square and in Western decision-making circles. It is becoming more insistent (...)