What happened in Geneva this Wednesday, in terms of finally bringing peace to Syria, could not be more significant: the first session of the Syrian Constitutional Committee. The Syrian Constitutional Committee sprang out of a resolution passed in January 2018 in Sochi, Russia, by a body called the Syrian National Dialogue Congress. The 150-strong committee…
Over the past century, the United Kingdom and then the United States have successively courted all states and faith groups in the Middle East. They have fuelled confessional conflicts in such a way as to make themselves indispensable, according to the old principle of “Divide and conquer”. President Trump was elected three years ago with…
Usually, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. But in the heavenly White House this weekend, it worked the other way round. Lord Trump took the life of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and then gave life back to ISIS by telling us all that he’d promised to send its surviving murderers to the borders of…
The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to recognize the deaths of many Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I as “genocide”, but for as much as this move has been praised by its proponents as the “right” thing to do, it was undertaken for the complete opposite of “altruistic” reasons and “historical…
No one would have thought that out of the US president Donald Trump’s decision three weeks ago to withdraw all American troops from Syria, a US military re-engagement with renewed vigour in that country would ensue. The US troops were first sent across to Iraq, but only to return to Syria with heavy armour and…
There have been protests (mostly pointing up economic stress) across the region for some months: from Egypt to Iraq. But the Lebanese demonstrations have caught the global attention. And there is no doubting that the Lebanese protests represent a major phenomenon. We may ask whether they are essentially a local manifestation, reflecting only the well-attested…
