As Arab and Western diplomats work to fashion tools to pressure the Syrian regime to end its military response to a year-old rebellion, an unrelenting artillery exacts a terrible daily toll on the residents of rebel-held Sunni …
civil war
Could Arming the Rebels Bring an End to Syria’s Suffering?
All Western interventions in messy civil wars on distant shores seem impossible until they become inevitable. Yet, not even the horrors being visited on an effectively defenseless civilian population by the Syrian regime’s …
Why Syrians Fight, and Why Their Civil War May be a Long One
The reason that there’s no plausible end-game in Syria anytime soon — and that thousands more Syrians may be fated to die before the conflict is ended — is that the Assad regime is fighting a very different war to the one …
How a Regional ‘Great Game’ Reinforces Syria’s Deadlock
Syria itself was the product of a “Great Game” among rival empires. The nation-state we know as Syria today was invented by France and Britain, which carved it out of the old Ottoman province of Syria (which back then included …
U.N. Security Council Meets: Syria’s Assad May Be Under Pressure, but He’s Not on His Way Out Yet
As geopolitical heavyweights gather in New York on Tuesday for a U.N. Security Council discussion on Syria’s increasingly bloody struggle for power, the Obama Administration insists the writing is on the wall: Syrian President …
The Fate of Bashar Assad: Will He Be the Next Gaddafi or the Next Milosevic?
The fighting words from Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, who vowed Tuesday to hold on to power and crush his opponents with “an iron fist”, were optimistically interpreted by some as the bluster of a doomed man. To be sure, the …
In Post-Gaddafi Libya, Freedom is Messy—and Getting Messier
“I fear this looks like a civil war”, one Libyan rebel commander from Misrata told the Associated Press, in the wake of a fierce firefight between rival militia factions using heavy weapons in broad daylight in Tripoli on …
Iraq After the War: Maliki’s Attack on Sunni Leaders Suggests a Dark, Divided Future
It might seem that the dust had hardly settled on the tracks of the last U.S. convoy that rolled out of Iraq on Saturday before Shi’ite and Sunni politicians were at one another’s throats. That would be a misleading impression, …
Paris Conference On Libya’s Future Opens In Optimism (And Opportunism)
Though their military operation to defeat forces loyal to Col. Muammar Gaddafi is not quite over, Libya’s opposition leaders sealed their political and diplomatic victory in Paris Thursday during the international conference to map plans on Libya’s post-war economic and political reconstruction. Heading into the meeting of …
Weekend Violence Increases Fears Of Libya’s Opposition Splitting Apart
It didn’t take the prescient gifts of Nostradamus to foresee that Thursday’s killing of Abdel Fattah Younes –commander of Libya’s anti-Gaddafi rebel forces–would exacerbate the tensions and divisions already rife within the opposition’s leadership. But it is a little surprising just how swiftly the suspicions of treason and …
The U.S. Civil War in Global Context — Not that Big of a Deal?
April 12 marked the 150th anniversary of the shelling of Fort Sumter, the island battery in Charleston harbor whose surrender to South Carolinian secessionists signaled the start of the Civil War. And while our attention rightly falls on the war’s dramatic — and traumatic — legacy, one which is still being grappled over to this day, …
After Libya, the Ivory Coast: Should the U.N. Sanction Military Intervention?
Yesterday, TIME’s Monica Mark reported from Abidjan of the spiraling crisis in the Ivory Coast:
The erstwhile beacon of prosperity and stability in West Africa has been held hostage for five months by incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo, who has refused to cede power after losing a November runoff presidential election. Instead, he has
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