Stephen Walt wonders: “Is Barack Obama More of a Realist Than I Am?” While Stephen Kinzer praises his “canny anti-interventionism,” and Syrian prodemocracy activist, Qusai Zakaria, assails him for his failure to punish Assad back in 2013 for launching the notorious chemical weapons attack against the civilian populations in the Damascene suburbs of Moadamieh and Ghoutah.
Is it an ingrained American attitude: battling the symptom while embracing the disease? Creating beautiful façades behind which to hide something that is deeply rotten and festering? If so, if this is indeed the truth, what does it really say about America? More specifically, what does is say about America’s political, economic, intellectual and artistic elite – because no matter how democratic a nation is, it’s always this elite that is ultimately responsible for shaping its image and molding its moral fabric.
Continue reading “From Syria to Ferguson: battling the symptom while embracing the disease”
American and Israeli hubris over the last decade has allowed Iran to dictate the rules on engagement in the Levant and the Middle East. The crises in Syria, Iraq and now Gaza are cases in point.
So Hamas has broken a ceasefire to kidnap an Israeli soldier. It happens in wars: ceasefires are often broken and soldiers captured. The best response Israel can do at this stage, as counterintuitive this will seem to its current leaders and their myriad supporters in Israel and across the world, is to immediately accept a new ceasefire. Then, Israeli officials should explain to their people what everybody seem to know at this stage but few dare talk about, that the real battle in Gaza is actually part of a larger regional proxy war with Iran. For this reason, Israeli officials should tell their people that rather than rush into undertaking actions designed to satisfy a certain popular need for revenge, Israel needs to take the time and think in strategic terms, lest it keeps playing into Iran’s hands.
Continue reading “Full-scale Israeli invasion of Gaza is good…for Iran.”
When there is no will to act, truth makes little difference.
This is what we have been talking about for the last four years. This is the proof of the genocidal venture that the Assad regime is still implementing in cooperation with his regional and international backers, especially Iran and Russia. This is what the self-declared champion of resistance against imperialism and Zionism, Bashar Al-Assad, has been doing to his own people for the last four years. And he did it all in the name of fighting an imperialist Zionist conspiracy! The gall and impunity of it all is mind-boggling, and soul-crushing.
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 