It’s just a coincidence that Gen. Khalifa Hifter (sometimes spelled Hiftar) launched his Libyan coup only four days after the US deployed 200 troops to Sicily – a "crisis response team" sent at the State Department’s request. Another coincidence: US-backed...
Public Hysteria Over Boko Haram Is Counterproductive
Although the Nigerian radical Islamist group Boko Haram has long made even the al Qaeda groups look moderate – slaughtering entire villages and shooting or burning to death 59 school boys – it apparently took the abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls to get...
100 Killed, 47 Wounded in Iraq Operations and Attacks
In Anbar: Five Sahwa members were killed and their leader was wounded in a clash with gunmen in Ramadi. Four gunmen were killed when a bomb accidentally blew them up. In Falluja, shelling killed four civilians and wounded five more. Four policemen were wounded in a...
Russian Manipulation of Reactor Fuel Belies US Iran Argument
In the stalemated talks between the six powers and Iran over the future of the latter’s nuclear program, the central issue is not so much the technical aspects of the problem but the history of the Middle Eastern country’s relations with foreign suppliers – and...
Fresh Iraq Clashes, Attacks Leave 39 Dead, 15 Wounded
Why NATO Has Not Permitted Russia To Join
As the West’s assault on Ukraine gets ever bloodier, the "news" on National Public Radio (NPR) is teeming with anti-Russian propaganda, interspersed with the usual pieces declaiming on one’s senior prom and other matters of equal import. All in all it is a...
The Return of Nationalism
It turns out that Francis Fukuyama, widely mocked post-9/11 for his proclamation that history has "ended," was right after all – but not in the way his journalistic interpreters imagined. Fukuyama’s thesis was that the ideological struggle over the forms of...
Security Ops, Attacks Kill 180, Wound 59 Across Iraq
78 Killed, 37 Wounded As Iraq Security Ops Continue
The Three-War Doctrine
U.S. troops have left Iraq and are leaving Afghanistan. The “war on terrorism” now seems so last decade. U.S. military spending has leveled off, and the Pentagon is looking at some fairly serious reductions after 2015. Last month, President Obama finally pulled the...