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| 1 |
ID:
115057
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| 2 |
ID:
115084
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Syria's tyrant Bashar al-Assad is in the middle of a life-or-death struggle. He might be overthrown. He should be.
The Arab Socialist Baath Party regime, beginning with its founder Hafez al-Assad and continuing through the rule of his son Bashar, is the deadliest state sponsor of terrorism in the Arab Middle East. It assisted the bloodthirsty insurgency in Iraq that killed American soldiers by the thousands and murdered Iraqi civilians by the tens of thousands. It has used both terrorism and conventional military power to place Lebanon under its boot since the mid-1970s. It made Syria into the logistics hub for Hezbollah, the best-equipped and most lethal non-state armed force in the world. It has waged a terrorist war against Israel and the peace process for decades, not only from Lebanon, but also from the West Bank and Gaza. And it is Iran's sole Arab ally and its bridge to the Mediterranean.
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| 3 |
ID:
134843
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| Summary/Abstract |
Nearly forty years after the Vietnam War, Hanoi holds no grudges against the United States, in part because nearly all the country’s negative energy today is focused on China. And for good reason: China is big; it’s powerful; it’s right next door; and it has been hostile for two thousand years. Vietnam’s war with the US will never be repeated, but its long history of conflict with China, which is roughly as old now as Christianity, hasn’t been settled and might be revving up yet again.
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| 4 |
ID:
138564
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Kurds in the north, who make up roughly twenty percent of the population, want out. They never wished to be part of Iraq in the first place. To this day, they still call the bathroom the “Winston Churchill,” in sarcastic homage to the former British prime minister who shackled them to Baghdad. Since the early 1990s, they’ve had their own government and autonomous region in the northern three provinces, and they held a referendum in 2005 in which 98.7 percent voted to secede and declare independence. The only reason they haven’t finally pulled the trigger is because it hasn’t been safe; the Turks—who fear the contagion of Kurdish independence inside their own country—have threatened to invade if they did.
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| 5 |
ID:
128425
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
A side from the Arab boycott against Israel, American sanctions against Cuba have lasted longer than any other embargo in the modern era. Is the US embargo against Cuba a Cold War relic or an effective tool? A recent visit suggests that the Castro regime's tyrannical imbecility still justifies continued sanctions. The sanctions were imposed in stages in the early 1960s after Fidel Castro began economic warfare against the United States by nationalizing private US property on the island. Cuban communism survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, so in 1993 the purpose of the embargo was modified by the Cuban Democracy Act, stating that it will not be lifted unless and until the government in Havana respects the "internationally accepted standards of human rights" and "democratic values."
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| 6 |
ID:
144418
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| Summary/Abstract |
While an exhausted United States simply wishes international migraines like the Syrian civil war would just go away, Russia is energized by the prospect of filling the vacuum.
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| 7 |
ID:
125289
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
America is in a bad mood.
In the midst of the worst economy since the 1970s, we're on the verge of losing the war in Afghanistan, the longest we've ever fought, against stupefyingly primitive foes.
We sort of won the war in Iraq, but it cost billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and Baghdad is still a violent, dysfunctional mess.
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| 8 |
ID:
122104
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Free speech is under attack in the West, and it's under attack from abroad. For years radical Islamists have targeted embassies abroad and individuals at home for "insulting" the Prophet Muhammad. And now diplomats and heads of state from Islamist countries are using international oganizations to pressure the West to criminalize blasphemy and are even lobbying for a global censorship regime.
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| 9 |
ID:
122124
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
"We Arabs," the late Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi once said to me in Beirut, "are not a warring people. We are a feuding people." That's generally true. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict looks far more like a Northern Ireland-style feud than a real war of the sort that tore apart the former Yugoslavia. The same goes for the chronic yet sporadic clashes in parts of Yemen, Libya, and Lebanon.
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| 10 |
ID:
141657
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| Summary/Abstract |
Turkey, a key member of NATO, has so far chosen to sit out the war against ISIS. Instead, it is at war with Kurdish militias in Syria, the only ground forces so far that have managed to take on ISIS and win.
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| 11 |
ID:
132150
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Shortly after the Arab Spring broke out at the tail end of 2010, two narratives took hold in the West. Optimists hailed a region-wide birth of democracy, as though the Middle East and North Africa were following the path blazed in Eastern Europe during the anti-communist revolutions of 1989. Pessimists fretted that the Arab world was following Iran's example in 1979 and replacing secular tyrants with even more repressive Islamist regimes.
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