Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hassan Rouhani will hold a summit this Wednesday in Sochi to discuss Syria. Russia, Turkey and Iran are the three power players at the Astana negotiations – where multiple cease-fires, as hard to implement as they are, at least evolve, slowly but surely, towards the ultimate target – a…
Morbid curiosity draw attention to the real-life Game of Thrones now playing out in Saudi Arabia, but the stories of intrigue among the Bedouin clans who control the kingdom are less interesting than the changes in the regional chessboard. Some of the facts are known, while others only can be inferred. The ascent of Crown…
Americans have been living in a country that has not known peace since 9/11, when President George W. Bush and his posse of neoconservatives delivered the message to the world that “you are either with us or against us.” The threat was coupled with flurry of hastily conceived legislation that opened the door to the…
SouthFront has just released a very interesting video analysis warning about the possibility of a war involving Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and, possibility, Syria, Iran, and Israel. That, of course, also means that Russia and the US would be involved. First, please see the video here: https://southfront.org/wp-content/uploads/video/fpd_nov_14_2017_Middle%20East.mp4 What I propose to do is go over the…
Anyone willing to think carefully and critically about the use of armed force against a target such as Islamic State (ISIS) would do well to read the intensively researched piece in the New York Times by investigative journalist Azmat Khan and Arizona State professor Anand Gopal about civilian casualties from the air war waged by…
The US does not consider itself constrained by the United Nations Security Council and might seek “justice” in Syria on its own terms, the US representative to the UN, Nikki Haley, has said. The US took similar action in Libya in 2011. “With the unity of this council, or alone, unrestrained by Russia’s obstructionism, we…
