US President Donald Trump could not possibly have predicted the game-changing after-effects of his triumphal sword dance in Riyadh. Or could he? The fact is the House of Saud went amok, in a flash, going after Qatar and bombing from the inside that glorious Arab NATO project – call it NATOGCC — sworn with pomp over a glowing orb. An excited Trump tweeted…
Backed by Egypt and its closest Gulf State allies, Saudi Arabia has launched a diplomatic and economic offensive against Qatar, a tiny, energy-rich neighbor. This offensive is aimed at forcing the emirate to fall fully in line with the Saudis’ belligerent stand against Iran and other of its predatory policies, including unstinting support for Egypt’s…
In what has emerged as the most significant escalation to result from the Qatar diplomatic crisis – which pits two of OPEC’s largest oil producers, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, against the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas and further disrupts stability in the region – the biggest Middle East oil and container ports…
America’s public neutrality over the Gulf crisis was shattered on Tuesday as President Donald Trump effectively backed the Gulf blockade of its ally Qatar. In a series of tweets, Trump said that his trip to the Middle East in May was “already paying off” as Gulf leaders followed through on their promise to take a…
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that President Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster will soon be proposing yet another troop increase in Afghanistan. According to the Times, “The White House shelved the deliberations over Afghanistan three weeks ago, after an initial Pentagon proposal to deploy up to 5,000 additional American troops ran into fierce resistance” from…
Iraqi and US crimes against humanity in and around Mosul threaten the fragile unity of the broken Iraqi nation. Contrary to Iraqi state propaganda and the statements of those hoping against hope that Iraq might at some point recover from decades of war and chaos, the sectarianism unleashed by George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s…
