As the situation in Syria continues along its dire path the discussion of a possible military intervention also persists. According to the UN Secretary General, there is no feasible military means of ending…
- Lecturer in Middle East Studies, Deakin University
In October Libya will officially celebrate its first anniversary of independence, though in fact it has been more than a year since Tripoli was overrun. In the same month the West will mark 11 years of…
Along with not selling them guns, germs or steel, it seems that American industry is no longer able to supply Iran with level 55 Night Elf warriors. According to the BBC, World of Warcraft (WoW) addicts…
When it comes to getting rocketed, nobody has more experience at it than the Israelis. For years now everything from sophisticated military missiles to backyard drainpipe firecrackers have been raining…
If truth is the first casualty of war, the Syrian uprising is a veritable massacre. The claim and counter-claim by both (or more correctly all) sides has left integrity wrapped in a sheet and buried in…
Last year’s ill-advised venture by American Vogue into Middle East politics has been given new oxygen. Joan Juliet Buck, former Vogue editor and the author of a puff piece on Syria’s first lady, has revealed…
Whilst it shouldn’t come as any surprise, al-Jazeera reports that Iraqi Kurds are running military training camps for their Syrian brothers. The President of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, says that…
In something reminiscent of the plot to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb, several high-ranking figures of the Assad regime have been killed in an apparent suicide attack. The top level security apparatchiks…
In the broad brush strokes used by the international media to depict the Middle East, a lot of the detail gets lost. And like a giant mosaic, an effect of this is that we tend to see only the same big…
Although Yasser Arafat was 75 when he died and hadn’t exactly had an easy life, there were always suspicions surrounding his quite sudden collapse into severe ill health and death. Conspiracy theories…
When I first read about the shooting down of a Turkish fighter aircraft by Syrian air defences I was amazed. Not by the act. Not by the fact that the Syrians were so on the ball. But by the fact that the…
These days we tend to think of Syria as a land of civil war, civilian atrocities and a repressive government, a country slowly but surely sliding into a full-scale meltdown. But now the US State Department…
A sad statistical milestone has just been passed in America: this year more troops have died from suicide than from battle. With Iraq out of the equation and the gradual winding down of the Afghanistan…
With boots on the ground being costly politically, economically and diplomatically, it seems that week after week, drones are the most important front line weapon against Washington’s opponents in the…
Whilst Syria has taken some of Iran’s usual bad boy limelight in the last couple of weeks, they’re still lurking in the background of any solution to regional stability. Indeed, every translator’s favourite…
Imagine a woman locked into an arranged marriage at an early age. She’s been living for decades with an abusive, unemployed, substance-abusing husband. He beats her and the kids regularly and is pretty…
The massacre in the Syrian town of Houla over the weekend is one of those events that seems to provide a tipping point of outrage. It’s not a particularly remarkable event by the standards of the Syrian…
As Egyptians count the votes to choose their first democratically-elected President, their neighbours in Israel are in a sphincter-clenching hiatus to see which way the cards fall. The winner of the Presidency…
At least one Lockerbie conspiracy theory has been laid to rest this week: that the only man convicted of the 1988 aircraft bombing was faking a terminal illness. But the death of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi…
The announcement this week of a coalition between Israel’s two biggest parties has pundits scrambling to provide polar opposite pronouncements on whether this is the death or resurrection of democracy…
A year after Osama bin Laden met up with the pointy end of Seal Team Six, it’s fascinating to hear that he was worried about the proliferation of terrorism. In a series of declassified “battlefield documents…
During the First World War, America began to build and test its first robot attack plane. Called the Curtiss-Sperry Flying Bomb, it was basically a full-sized biplane with some primitive radio controls…
While the press corps of some countries spend thousands of hours and millions of words speculating on minor leadership shuffles, their colleagues in Libya enjoy a slightly greater economy of scale. This…
In late 2004 war nerds all over the world were nuking the popcorn and drinking in the sight of the US Marines going toe-to-toe with insurgents in Fallujah. Finally the cowardly terrorists were going to…
How do you end the conflict in Syria? Easy. Just get the President’s missus to bend his ear about human rights abuses and he’s bound to stop. The latest hit with the slacktivists is to sign a petition…
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