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Archives by Tag 'Syria'
Back in February I wrote for Asia Times about the Chinese diplomatic initiative on Syria, which is now largely repr...
Tripoli, Lebanon
It would be an incautious stretch to suggest any sort of parity between Watergate and the unfolding Lutfallah II arms shipment-to-Syria drama, that each day brings more revelations. But some of what we are daily learning about the who, wha...
Patrick Seale’s 1965 classic, The Struggle for Syria, describes the battle for control ...
The Syrian conflict continued to boil — or boil over — when Syrian troops fired across the Turkish border on April 9, apparently killing either fleeing refugees or armed combatants.
Then the UN team entered and began monitoring a shaky ceasefire – sha...
Tariq Ali is still searching for socialism with a human face. He sits on the editorial board of the New Left Review and is a regular columnist for The Guardian, CounterPunch and the London Review of Books. He compares Marx with the Prometheus of Greek mythology who stole...
Within the first few months of 2011, the U.S. and its allies lost three loyal “friends”: Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Zine el-Abbidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Saad Hariri in Lebanon. While Mubarak and Ali were driven out of power by widespread popular uprisings, Hariri was ...
One year ago, I was in Kentucky, at my mother’s bedside after she made a decision to stop eating. Her death wasn’t unexpected. She had lived a long, meaningful life with much more joy than sorrow.
I remember a little poem she loved to quote, one I’ve Goog...
The Levant means “where the sun rises”: the eastern Mediterranean. Levant is a geographical word, free of associations with race or religion, defined not by nationality but by the sea. The great Levantine cities of Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut were windows on the wor...
The usual suspects are at it again — doing their damnedest to escalate a war they have no intention of either fighting in or paying for themselves, and to involve you in it.
US Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (of the “Connecticut for Liebe...
In Northern Ireland it used to be called “the politics of the last atrocity”, when the latest act of violence and the retaliation it provoked dictated the direction of day-to-day politics. Syria has travelled far in this direction, its towns convulsed by mini-...
On March 21, 2012, the fifteen-member UN Security Council voted unanimously, for the first time, to push the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, towards a diplomatic settlement, by ordering it to comply with the Six Point plan presented by Kofi Anan, the former UN Secretary...
The sound of what seems like thunder wakes me up at 3 am, Monday, a few hours after I arrived in Damascus. Storm coming, I think, and my jetlagged brain plunges back to sleep.
When I go down to jog at six, the side streets around the Hotel Arjaan are blocked ...
The year-long effort to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad and his government has failed. Two or three months ago, it seemed to come close to succeeding, as insurgents took over enclaves in cities such as Homs and Deir el-Zour. There was talk of no-fly zones and foreign ...
The last twenty or so months have certainly been months of insurrection. This is perhaps no truer anywhere on earth than in the Middle East and northern Africa. Indeed, there is even a phrase describing this fact. That phrase is “the Arab Spring.” Exactly what...
Beirut
One fellow who works at the Beirut US Embassy tells the story of how, each year around the time of the vernal equinox, since 2005 when Jeffrey Feltman became the American Ambassador (given Jeff’s domination of US Middle East Policy, he ...
As in the case of Libya, from NY Times to Fox News, from Guardian to National Post and from Le Monde to Le Figaro, the Western mainstream media’s coverage of the Syrian conflict has been mostly simplistic and black & white with a Hollywoodian good (oppos...
Last week, there were marches throughout the streets of 20 different cities in demonstrations by citizens calling themselves, “Victims of State Crimes.” And indeed, these crimes have been considerable, involving murder, kidnapping and forced displacement of civilian...
I remember during the “Libyan Revolution”; the tally of casualties resulting from Gaddafi’s crack down on protesters was being reported by the mainstream media with such a “dramatic” fervor that it hardly left the public with a moment to at least second-guess th...
I shudder when Sarah Palin comes on the television accusing President Obama of palling around with terrorists, mostly I fear that she may, someday, catch up with me to disclose to the public my history of palling around with terrorists. To pre-empt Sarah, I will tell ...
There are two tales about the crisis in Syria.
In one, the vast majority of Syrians have risen up against the brutality of a criminal dictatorship. The government of Bashar al Assad is on the ropes, isolated regionally and internationally, and only holding on becau...
More than a year after civil unrest broke out and plunged part of Syria into the chaos of the ‘Arab Spring’, the Baath government remains firmly in control and the majority of the country is calm; almost untouched by an opposition which is scattered and confined to th...
Over the last couple days the Syrian army has moved into the Baba Amr district of Homs.
The action is Syria’s Tiananmen.
The Western shorthand for Tiananmen is “authoritarian regime reveals its true monstrous face to the world and its own citizens by tra...
Syria has a secular government as did Iraq prior to the American invasion. Secular governments are important in Arab lands in which there is division between Sunni and Shi’ite. Secular governments keep the divided population from murdering one another.
When the...
IF I were to follow the call of my heart, I would appeal to our government to send the Israeli army into Syria, drive the Assad gang from Damascus, turn the country over to the Syrian opposition or the UN, and go home.
That wouldn’t even be very difficult.
...
A sizeable minority has opposed the “government” – actually representatives of a crony corrupt elite – for decades, now. Members of that minority have been imprisoned in per capita numbers higher than Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China. The government sancti...