The Dead Sea came briefly to life on Saturday, as 1,200 Israelis shed their clothes and posed with their arms at their sides for the American photographer Spencer Tunick, whose business is making art from public nudity on a mass scale.
The idea was to draw attention to the steady decline of the famously salty lake, which exposes …
The handwringing in the U.S. over the rock-star reception Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is eliciting on his “Arab Spring” tour of post-dictatorship Egypt, Tunisia and Libya is misguided. Erdogan represents a reality-based, credible and very popular incarnation of the old Bush Administration idea of a moderate Middle …
There are countless great sources for those following the Middle East’s political clock by the movement of its second- and minute-hands. But for those looking to track the movement of the hour-hand, there are few better options than the New York Review of Books tag-team of Hussein Agha and Rob Malley. The former Palestinian …
During his first year in office, President George W. Bush was confronted by the key strategic challenge facing the United States in the new century, in an incident that began with the diversion of a U.S. aircraft — by Chinese fighter planes, which forced a U.S. Navy spy plane to land on the island of Hainan after a collision that …
Baha Mousa, a 26-year old hotel worker in Basra, Iraq, died eight years ago following an “appalling episode of serious gratuitous violence” carried out by British soldiers in “a very serious breach of discipline,” a public inquiry has concluded.
In a damning 1,400-page report published this morning, retired judge William …
Israel’s fallout with long-time ally Turkey is no isolated spat that will be repaired any time soon; it’s a dramatic illustration that no amount of U.S. backing can prevent the growing international isolation resulting from Israel’s handling of the Palestinian issue. Indeed, the unconditional nature of Washington’s backing may, in …
It’s easy to see how Libya offers a “new model” for American intervention abroad when comparing it with the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003, but the mission to overthrow the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has too much in common with the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan to mark it, at this stage, as the herald of a new era of …
Any reader of the George R.R. Martin Songs of Ice and Fire series (whose opening book, Game of Thrones, was turned into riveting television on HBO) might see a familiar pattern in the events that threaten to plunge the Israel-Gaza border into a new escalation of violence.
In Martin’s fantasy geopolitics, as in the real world, …
The 32 terror attacks that killed 70 people across Iraq on Monday prompted a knee-jerk question in much of the media: Would or should the uptick in violence prompt a rethink of plans to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq by New Year’s Eve?
The short answer is no, and the longer answer is probably not.
U.S. withdrawal from Iraq …
As the Assad regime on Sunday escalated its brutal crackdown by sending gunboats to shell the coastal city of Latakia, yet the rebellion shows no sign of abating despite at least 1,700 deaths so far, Syria’s fate may come to rest less in the hands of its own people, than in the corridors of power in neighboring and more distant …
Washington may have cut an unlovable deal to avert a default on its debts, but U.S. and global stock markets are tanking anyway. That’s because the measures agreed Tuesday can’t reverse the slide of the U.S. economy — its fundamentals, to use a phrase beloved by politicians, are less than sound. So, what the world sees in America’s …
“Liberal Interventionists” in Washington had hoped, last March, that the decision by the U.S., Britain and France to launch U.N.authorized military action in Libya represented a new Western willingness to protect civilians under threat by their own regimes. The paralysis of the same governments and the wider international community …
Details surrounding Thursday’s assassination of the commander of Libyan rebel forces remained confused on Friday, though one thing does seem clear amid the uncertainty: the killing isn’t good news for insurgents battling Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, or the Western nations backing their effort. Indeed, initial reaction to the death of …