Alison Weir’s relatively short book covers the history of Zionism in the United States from the last decades of the 19th century until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. (She is working on a second volume that will carry this history to the present.) Its brevity does not mean, however, that it…
The Iraqi armed forces are becoming bogged down in the battle for Mosul. Its elite special forces and an armoured division are fighting to hold districts in the eastern outskirts of the city against counter-attacks by Isis fighters using networks of tunnels to move about unseen. “In one day we lost 37 dead and 70…
The Indian Defence Acquisitions Council (DAC), chaired by India’s Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, has pre-approved an armaments modernization project for the Indian armed forces for a total sum of 821 billion rupees (over $ 12 billion), the Times of India (TOI) reported. According to the report in the TOI, what has been approved is the purchase of…
The pivot was always an auto–da–fé, an act of faith: a cumbersome, expensive, difficult, and onerous strategy that ran counter to the trend of declining American relative strength and indeed was attempting to reverse it. Sort of like how the Catholic Church used the Inquisition as an elaborate public ritual to command faith in the…
Turkey, in a bid to legitimize its uninvited, illegal incursion into northern Syria, has created several media platforms specifically reporting on what it calls “Operation Euphrates Shield.” Operation Euphrates Shield, according to official Turkish government statements, aims at “securing” a buffer zone in northern Syria spanning from the Euphrates river in the east and extending…
As the United States ushers in a new right wing president into office, South Korea is about to give theirs the boot. One million people gathered in Seoul on November 12 to demand Park Geun-hye’s resignation. This is the largest protest South Korea has seen since the democratic uprising of June 1987. Train and bus…
