Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Arab world”
The achievement of “implementation day” of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), when for both sides the central elements of the nuclear bargain went into operation on Saturday, means that it is going to be a fact of life in global and regional politics for many years. But will it have a profound impact on regional politics? That is …
Now that Saudi Arabia has severed diplomatic ties with Iran and reportedly bombed Iran’s embassy in Yemen, the big question is whether the Saudis are desperate and unhinged enough to launch an attack across the Persian Gulf. While Saudi leaders insist they have no such intent, there are mounting pressures pushing them in that direction. The ruling family is under unprecedented strain. Its …
Forces from America, Japan, France, Germany, Italy—and soon, even China—are crammed into the dirt-poor Djibouti. Good luck asking the locals if they like all the attention. There’s a smell of sewage out on the beaches outside, juxtaposed with tangerine, sunset views glimmering atop the murky waves. Looking southward across the warm waters of the Gulf of Aden, whale sharks congregate …
Saudi Arabia’s binge of head-choppings – 47 in all, including the learned Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, followed by a Koranic justification for the executions – was worthy of Isis. Perhaps that was the point. For this extraordinary bloodbath in the land of the Sunni Muslim al-Saud monarchy – clearly intended to infuriate the Iranians and the entire Shia …
Five years ago in Tunisia a nationwide rebellion erupted against the government of Zine Abideen Ben Ali. Youth, students, workers and small businesspeople rose up demanding an end to the system of dictatorship and subservience to France and the United States. By mid-January of 2011, Ben Ali’s regime had fallen forcing him to flee to Saudi Arabia. An interim government …
Reason with this: Who is carrying out senseless killings in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon? They are the same people carrying out attacks here, and we know them. We cannot be cowed” – Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky According to the Nigerian Government forces, a traffic infringement justifies the massacre of over 1000 Muslims who were performing the religious ceremony of …
I am honored to speak at this symposium in Okinawa about the need to abolish United States military bases around the world, and particularly here in Okinawa where you have been subjected to these bases for over 70 years following World War II. From the beginning, let me state that I apologize for the continuing presence of so many U.S. …
Steven Erlanger in the New York Times, asks: Are Western Values Losing Their Sway? Here’s my two cents: The problem with our “Western values” is not the values in themselves, although some are certainly questionable. The real problem is the triumphalism that came with them after the West’s ‘victory’ at the end of the Cold War, a dangerous triumphalism that …
Another war is in the making in Libya: the questions are ‘how’ and ‘when’? While the prospect of another military showdown is unlikely to deliver Libya from its current security upheaval and political conflict, it is likely to change the very nature of conflict in that rich, but divided, Arab country. An important pre-requisite to war is to locate an …
On March 1st 1954 the United States tested its first deliverable hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The weapon yielded a force three times as large as its designers had planned or anticipated.1 The radioactive fallout cloud that resulted from the weapon would kill a fisherman located 100 km away, cause illness in hundreds and perhaps thousands of …
