Is a counter-revolutionary tide beginning to favour the "strongmen" of the Arab world, whose regimes appeared a couple of months ago to be faltering under the impact of the Arab Awakening? From Libya to Bahrain and Syria to Yemen, leaders are clinging on to power despite intense pressure from pro-democracy protesters. And the counter-revolution has... Read More

How to turn a ''kinetic military action'' - which is not a war - into some sort of endgame, by bending a United Nations resolution that was allegedly passed to minimize a humanitarian threat? You write a lame op-ed. Just ask The Three Amigos - US President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and... Read More

If former Pentagon supremo Donald "known unknown" Rumsfeld were still in business, he'd be grumbling that Libya presents no bombable targets - as in Afghanistan in 2001. As far as United States quagmires go, Libya is bigger than Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined. But any possible "targets" concentrate in a few cities along the Mediterranean... Read More

United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is in Riyadh to talk to Saudi King Abdullah. The Associated Press told the world's media they should discuss the "Arab upheaval". Then there are all those other cliches - "political reform", oil production, "the Iran threat". But as the Pentagon meets the House of Saud at the... Read More

Odyssey Dawn slogs on - a tawdry "kinetic military action" (as per the White House) worthy of the Pentagon's resident Homer. The stalemate on the ground could go on for weeks, if not months. This is more like The Iliad remixed - remember, the Trojan War slogged on for 10 years without a decisive result.... Read More

The current Arab counter-revolution is brought to you by the House of Saud - and enabled by the Pentagon. The Gulf has been plunged into pre-emptive war. After the initial euphoria of the great 2011 Arab revolt, the message of the Gulf kingdoms and sheikhdoms to Washington has been unambiguous - and effective; if we... Read More

The "enlightened" West has just sent a message to the rebelling Libyan people; Muammar Gaddafi's forces will have to dissolve you into a sea of blood before we decide to do anything. And even if we do, it may be too late. Sorry. As for the African king of kings, he just had to slightly... Read More

United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates visits Bahrain to meet King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa on Saturday. Saudi Arabia invades Bahrain on Monday. This has got to be just a coincidence; Gates and the king were obviously discussing the fortunes of Ferrari and MacLaren in the (postponed) Formula 1 Grand Prix in Bahrain. Moreover, this... Read More

Three mummies were recently found in an underground temple in Luxor, Egypt. Translated hieroglyphs identified them as the Clash of Civilizations, the End of History, and Islamophobia. They ruled in Western domains into the second decade of the 21st century before dying and being embalmed. That much is settled. Without them, the Middle East is... Read More

Ten years ago, on the road in AfPak before and after 9/11, the volume of choice in my backpack was a French edition of Gilles Kepel’s Jihad. Night after night, in many a mud brick house and amid endless cups of green tea, I slowly came to embrace its key thesis: that political Islam was... Read More

You're Muammar Gaddafi, and you're sitting in your Bab al-Azizia bunker sipping green tea and surveying the odds of staying in power. Let's see. You control some neighborhoods in Tripoli; some cities in the far west, near the Tunisian border; your birthplace, Sirte. And that's it. You may have lost like 90% of your country.... Read More

You don't stay 41 years in power without learning a geopolitical trick or two. A wily fox, the African king of kings Muammar Gaddafi seems to have carefully surveyed the chessboard and come to an iron-clad conclusion; the no-fly option - not to mention an invasion of Libya - won't fly in the United Nations... Read More

The key slogan in Tahrir Square in Egypt was "the people want the downfall of the regime". When it comes to Saudi Arabia, it's more like "the House of Saud wants the downfall of its people". Which brings us to the US$36 billion question; can an ailing monarch (Saudi King Abdullah) bribe his subjects with... Read More

The great 2011 Arab revolt, the cry for democracy in Northern Africa, the mostly Shi'ite revolt in the Persian Gulf, the Western despair over the price of oil, and the new United States Middle East doctrine of "regime alteration" - not to mention the Pentagon's full-spectrum dominance doctrine - have been convoluted into the ultimate... Read More

In the standoff - not civil war - between state power in Tripoli and a tribal-based parallel government plus "irregular militias", identifying key players in Libya gets increasingly murky. It's a long (1,000 kilometer), windy, desert road from Benghazi to Tripoli, or from uprising to victory, with a crucial midway stop in Sirte - Muammar... Read More

How does it feel to be on your own, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone, crisscrossing the desert sands, howling to the winds that the end of the end of history is now? Western ideological categories lie mummified in a tomb. There's no dichotomy, or "clash" of civilizations, between Western parliamentary democracy and... Read More

Most accounts of the Arab revolts from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Iraq and elsewhere have focused on the most immediate causes: political dictatorships, unemployment, repression and the wounding and killing of protestors. They have given most attention to the “middle class�, young, educated activists, their communication via the internet, (Los Angeles Times,... Read More

Forget "democracy"; Libya, unlike Egypt and Tunisia, is an oil power. Many a plush office of United States and European elites will be salivating at the prospect of taking advantage of a small window of opportunity afforded by the anti-Muammar Gaddafi revolution to establish - or expand - a beachhead. There's all that oil, of... Read More

Picture a feudal, or neo-medieval, paradise, the former home of legendary Sindbad the Sailor, absolutely ruled by an unmarried, slim, lute-playing septuagenarian who prefers to live alone in his palace; paradigm of discretion Sultan Qabus bin Sa'id. That, in a nutshell, is Oman. Oman practices Ibadi Islam - neither Sunni nor Shi'ite - also found... Read More

Author's introduction A bottom-up democratic revolution in Egypt has brought down what had seemed until very recently to be the unshakable rule of Hosni Mubarak. It was an amazing accomplishment of the people's power — something that is often sloganized about but rarely realized. The fact that the revolution succeeded with little violence on the... Read More

Usually reliable intelligence sources are reporting that the situation for a couple of Arab rulers is getting desperate. Moammar Ghaddafi actually used artillery against crowds of demonstrators in Benghazi this morning, killing hundreds, and is calling up his tribal supporters and telling them to prepare for civil war...also Saudi troops have crossed the causeway and... Read More

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton rushed to contrast the repressive brutality of the Iranian authorities with what they now seek to present as the bloodless, US-managed triumph of pro-democracy forces in Egypt. By any measure this was brazen impudence, starting with the fact that across the past few weeks the 300 dead, slaughtered... Read More

We need good news. When was the last time we had some, here in this country? The Seattle riots against the WTO? That was back in 1999. Around the world? Hard to remember – it’s been a long dry spell. It reminds me of the old Jacobin shivering in the chill night of Bourbon restoration,... Read More

Here's a crash course on the Egyptian military dictatorship's sinister worldview compared with the courage displayed by people power. Exhibit A: Vice President Omar "Sheik al-Torture" Suleiman's message to the revolution. Pay special attention to the end of the interview. [1] Context: this is the horse Washington has decided to bet on, the conductor of... Read More

The Egyptian revolution is being dissolved right in front of the world's eyes by an optical illusion. The protesters who have been on the streets for two weeks still want President Hosni Mubarak out. Now. Yet United States President Barack Obama is firmly in not-so-fast mode, glad that "Egypt is making progress". Obama has not... Read More