Lost in Jubilation!

As always in our turbulent region, victory is in the eye of the beholder, and we so desperately need to feel victorious we are willing to see victory even in ruins. No wonder our victors have recently been nothing more than charlatans, thieves and murderers.Indeed, neither victory nor victors are what they used to be. As the old saying goes: “The times are no longer the times, and men no longer the men (la al-dinyeh dinyeh, wa la al-naas naas).” Civilization in these parts has gotten so bloody old, it seems, the gift of victory has much depreciated in value over time. Continue reading →

The Sahhaf Mentality!

The former Iraqi Minister of Information, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, who was the last such minister to serve under Saddam Hussein, has long gone down in history as the man who kept on denying the reality of what was actually taking place in the country with regard to the unfolding battle and kept on issuing defiant statements as he had clearly been instructed to do right until the moment US troops stormed into Saddam’s palace in Baghdad. Continue reading →

Welcome to Regional War!

The defiant declarationof the Syrian Foreign Minister, Walid al-Moallem, which he made during his brief visit to Beirut, especially the “welcome with regional war” part should begin to raise certain eyebrows in Tel Aviv, in Washington, in Paris, and all across the world. People really need to ask themselves now whether we are not indeed heading towards such a war. For even if Israel and the US are not exactly interested in having things go that far,the possibility remains that the more trouble Israel has in Lebanon and the US in Iraq, and the more beatable the two powers appear, the more tempting the push for war will be by the other side of the equation, namely the alliance that was formed not too long ago, by Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and the radical wing in Hamas, among other Palestinian groups. Continue reading →

The Reason I Don’t Criticize Israel!

“While Israeli actions in Lebanon are outrageous…” I think this is pretty much the only condemnation of Israeli actions in Lebanon that I have made ever since the beginning of the current tragedy. I frankly thought that this little adjective, “outrageous,” would prove quite sufficient to convey my feelings about this new round of Israeli aggression and intransigence in our midst. But many seem to have had a different impression. Indeed, quite a few people have so far conveyed their “annoyance” with me for failing to be more critical of Israel, and some have even begun to draw their own conclusions about my motivations in this regard, ones laced with a rather “healthy” doze of the sort of conspiratorial thinking for which we are all too famous. Continue reading →