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As the Lebanese lock down, Beirut is being forced to realise how unsustainable its political and economic choices have been.
Shaykh al-Azhar Ahmed al-Tayyib criticized the state of Arabs and Muslims worldwide–including, one presumes, its rulers.
Whatever Israel and the Palestinians need to succeed in making peace, what they don’t need is a framework that may well have hung a closed-for-the-season sign both on a viable peace process and Washington’s credibility as a fair and effective broker.
The new Lebanese government must deal with the gargantuan task of an economic meltdown of historic proportions.
The last time Libya’s war had the world’s full attention, it was being fought mainly by Libyans.
Animated by an extreme pro-Israeli bias and frustration with the Palestinians, the administration has now changed the game and fundamentally altered the U.S. approach of the past three administrations by aligning its view with Israel’s on the the country’s final borders.
Washington’s apparent aim is to facilitate Israel’s desire to take the maximum amount of Palestinian land with the least number of Palestinians.
Without an understanding of what was lost and how it happened—and why the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran played such a crucial role in this unraveling—a better future for the Middle East will remain elusive, and the world’s understanding of the region will remain incomplete.
Turkey’s military intervention in Libya, involving the deployment of Syrian fighters, is the latest chess move in a long-running civil war that followed the 2011 revolution, the NATO-led intervention, and the overthrow of the dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
Qaboos seemed an anachronism in his final years on the throne, a temperate leader in an intemperate Middle East. His passing has huge consequences for the fate of his temperate model, with all its imperfections.
Under Soleimani’s command, Iran became the only country in the region capable of harnessing both Shiite extremism and, at times, Sunni radicalism too.
Presidents make lonely, difficult decisions about the use of force to protect U.S. interests—usually with the solace of knowing at least that diplomacy had failed. The tragedy of the current plight is that diplomacy was succeeding before it was abandoned.
As the news of the killing of Qassem Suleimani sunk in, the differences between how it was covered in the West and the reaction in the wider Arab world became clear.
Altering American foreign policy while maintaining national security imperatives is never a matter of just pulling the plug.
Inside the Islamic Republic, the impact of Soleimani’s death will take years to appreciate. But its immediate effect was to throw the regime a lifeline.
Both President Donald Trump and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have something in common: they both want to hang on to power and a major war between Iran and the United States is not good politics for either one.
A major war with Iran is by no means inevitable. But the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani is a roll of the dice that just might take us there.
The collateral damage from the strike on Qassem Soleimani will likely be greater than the Trump administration bargained for.
Washington doesn’t have is a realistic approach to dealing with Iran. And with every day that passes, that is more and more painfully apparent.
Soleimani was respected and feared, seen as either the evil mastermind behind policies of death and destruction or the genius architect of Iran’s expansionist policies.