The neoconservatives in the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton and the Syria envoy James Jeffery, are scrambling to save their plans for Syria that President Trump disposed of when he ordered a complete retreat. Those plans were for a permanent U.S. occupation of northeast Syria, the reduction of…
I was typing away the day after Christmas with the warmth of a crackling fire behind me and thinking about the long list of countries involved in the Syrian war drama. They are now scurrying around to draw up contingency plans, not only for what action they might need to take now, but how to…
The world is safer now that there’s one less Al Qaeda terrorist inhabiting it, but Trump’s successful strike against USS Cole bomber Jamal al-Badawi in central Yemen also served several tangential domestic and international purposes, too. The news just broke that Trump successfully took out USS Cole bomber Jamal al-Badawi after ordering a strike on the…
When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently declared that Turkey was “the only country that can lead the Muslim world,” he probably wasn’t only thinking of Middle Eastern and other Islamic states such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. Increasingly, there is evidence that Indian Muslims, the Islamic world’s fourth largest community after Indonesia and the South Asian…
The United States and China look like two punch-drunk prizefighters squaring off for a major championship fight. They have no good reason to fight and every reason to cooperate now that both their stock markets have been in turmoil. Six hundred point market swings down and then up look like symptoms of economic nervous breakdown….
Trump’s deployment of 80 military personnel to Gabon last week on the basis of preparing for a response to “violent protests” in the nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo might have been a ruse designed to cover up America’s complicity in the Gabonese coup attempt that just took place at the beginning of this week,…
