Going back at least as early as the 1989 Presidential election of Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran has been attempting to end its international isolation by improving relations with the United States. And at least since the election of Iran’s next President, Seyyed Mohammad...
Regime change is a complex and messy thing. Attempts at regime change always involve three parties: the government who desires to carry out the regime change, the regime it wishes to change, and the domestic group meant to replace the current regime or at least...
Over a year ago, as chaos erupted in Ukraine, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was one of the first voices to join the choir of hyperbole in the refrain that Putin’s invasion of Crimea was analogous to Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland. His – at the time –...
A pattern is emerging across current events from Syria to Iran to Ukraine. The pattern has two parts. In the first, America is increasingly in conflict with her natural allies. America, contrary to its mythical image as the cops of the world, fans the flames of...
Two weeks ago, an Israeli helicopter crossed the Syrian border and killed five Hezbollah fighters and an Iranian general. Media accounts made much of the fact that among the dead Hezbollah fighters was Jihad Mughniyah. That particular killing was significant because...
It is still not known with certainty who hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment. Several security analysts have questioned the FBI’s assertion that North Korea is to blame. An analysis by the security firm Norse suggests that the evidence points, not to North Korea, but...
The claim has recently been made that the Obama administration concocted not only the imminent attacks on U.S. soil by the al-Qaeda cell The Khorasan Group, but the group itself, in order to make a case for self-defense and justify the bombing of Syria. As outlandish...
The wide wake that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is leaving across the Levant is mysterious in a number of ways. How they have so easily overwhelmed a third of Syria and a quarter of Iraq is one. But perhaps most mysterious is the American response to the...
In history, as in fiction writing, where you decide to start your narrative plays a major role in shaping your story. The story of the causes of a particular historical event can be shaped by the historians and writers who have access to the media and publishers...
Once in a while the inconsistencies in American foreign policy become sufficiently clear to reveal the consistency in American foreign policy. Three contemporary inconsistencies in Iraq and Syria, all clearly connected, converge to throw America’s consistent foreign...
