In these days, as Iraqi forces backed up by the US-led coalition are trying to break the last stand of ISIS resistance in the battle for Mosul, the world will witness the laying of a milestone in the war against the cancerous terrorist ... ... prominent terrorist leaders such as Al-Baghdadi seem amazingly successful at this hide and seek game. It is impossible to forget how Usama Bin Laden evaded - admittedly with surprising effectiveness - the best efforts of the intelligence services of half the ...
... noted in “The End of History,” the end of the Cold War marked the end of thousands of years of ideological struggle, and the spread of Western Democratic capitalist... ... and did nothing to prevent the onset of the greatest global financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression (barely managing to address it in time to prevent a... ... pressures of EU policy, as racial, ethnic, and religious tension, fears of Islamic terrorism, nativism, and demagogues become ever more commonplace, it is terrifying to...
... Iran, and Hezbollah and that Egypt’s own explosive and volatile domestic security situation with its own people and an ISIS franchise running amok in the Sinai (one which apparently was able to blow up a Russian airliner) will not be major liabilities.... ... to harm Russia’s interests more than those gains would help them: Russia is particularly vulnerable to Sunni extremist terrorism for a number of clear reasons and its moves in Syria, as I have written before, are only going to expose Russia to further ...
... Middle East Strategy (Sensibly): Part I
4.) Dealing with Syria’s Civil War
AMMAN — Amidst a sea of Middle Eastern conflicts, the civil war raging in Syria is currently the largest and deadliest. Here, as in other situations, we have a crisis in which we must be careful not to blame Obama too much but must also note the missed opportunities where his substantive leadership could have made a huge difference, though not without some risk involved. So, right from the start, it must be acknowledged ...
... January 2009 and America was not in the midst of the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression. Still even more amusing and amazing are that many of... ... settlement housing units to be built on illegally occupied, disputed land in East Jerusalem (which was occupied in 1967 along with the West Bank and Gaza and which Israel... ... consequences for such mistreatment.
Grade: D+
Obama deserves some credit for robust public diplomacy consistently condemning Israeli settlement expansion and even condemning the...
... itself from the Gulf.
It’s amazing that it’s taken us so long to realize how much our money going into Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states comes back to haunt us: though Joe Biden recently got in trouble for saying so, support for ISIS and other Islamic extremists and terrorists from very wealthy individuals motivated by the Saudi state-sponsored and ever-present-throughout-the-Gulf religious cult of Wahhabism/Salafism streams out of the Gulf like an oil spill, polluting the entire ...
... former al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia groups calling themselves first the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/the Levant/al-Sham (ISIS or ISIL) and now just Islamic State (IS) might possibly have been the worst, most brutal, most powerful terrorist organization ... ... and production were being threatened. Finally, and certainly not least among the reasons, ISIS was murdering and abusing thousands in ways that even al-Qaeda thought went too far. Christians, Yazidis, Shiites, other minorities, and even Sunnis that were ...