Truth and reconciliation? It won’t happen in Syria By Robert Fisk, Saturday, 7 May 2011 … If you want to understand the cruel tragedy of Syria, there are two books you must read: Nikolaos van Dam’s The Struggle for Power in Syria and, of course, Patrick Seale’s biography Assad. Van Dam was an ambassador in …
Category: Foreign Policy
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2011/05/07/golgotha-gone/
May 07 2011
Everybody smoke
The real meaning of Bin Laden’s death By Johann Hari, Friday, 6 May 2011 … Scramble the film backwards. Rewind. Go back to the day 10 years ago when the air here in Manhattan was thick with ash and Osama bin Laden was gloating. There were two options for the US government – to pick …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2011/05/07/everybody-smoke/
May 07 2011
Been there, done that
Good advice. Been there; done that (1957). Seemed like a good idea at the time, according to Eisenhower and two good old Presbyterian Princetonians named Dulles. Bad idea, however. We don’t do intervention very well. Result: more harm than good! Still paying the price! Ray Leave Syria to the Syrians By Charles Glass, May 02, 2011 … This is not a good time to be running …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2011/05/07/been-there-done-that/
May 02 2011
Mirror, mirror
Stop blaming Israel for every grievance in the Middle East By Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Monday, 2 May 2011 … First came the Arab spring (followed, in some lands, by the harshest of winters) and now Hamas and Fatah have signed a deal for unity. Naturally, Israel is as panicked as are Arab despots by the shifts …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2011/05/02/mirror-mirror/
May 02 2011
Close encounters
A close encounter with the man who shook the world By Robert Fisk, Tuesday, 3 May 2011 … One hot evening in late June 1996, the telephone on my desk in Beirut rang with one of the more extraordinary messages I was to receive as a foreign correspondent. “Mr Robert, a friend you met in …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2011/05/02/close-encounters/
May 02 2011
Is this what we wanted?
How the U.S. ‘Won’: Torture, Secret Prisons By Jack Stuef, 3:09 pm May 2, 2011 … In the midst of all the celebrations that good finally defeated evil yesterday, there is this fact: the U.S. got the leads that allowed it to find and kill Osama bin Laden from two men: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2011/05/02/is-this-what-we-wanted/
Apr 30 2011
Southern weed
It’s official. We know now that there is nothing that will ever appease the nutters who desperately hate our President. Frenzied conspiracy theories have always thrived in the fertile imaginations of America’s fringy shadowlands, those dark, squishy places just beyond the edge of sanity. But in this topsy-turvy silly season, with abject nonsense cropping up all around …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2011/04/30/southern-weed/