Unable to assuage their grievances with empty promises of reform, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad this week adopted the “Tiananmen Model” of dealing with a popular protest movement. Like the Chinese authorities in 1989, Assad on Monday sent in the tanks and thousands of troops to reclaim the streets of Deraa, where the rebellion began …
U.S.
McCain Visits Rebels In Libya And Calls For Increased Support
Is Sen. John McCain’s visit Friday morning to the Benghazi strong-hold of Libya’s rebel forces a sign of creeping escalation in the conflict with strongman Muammar Gaddafi that may lead to eventual troop deployment by Western nations? Impossible to know at this point, of course, but events coinciding with McCain’s visit to …
In Libya’s Forgotten West, Rebels Gain Ground
According to reports, rebel forces fighting the regime of Muammar Gaddafi seized a strategic Libyan border crossing with Tunisia in the country’s remote, rugged west. Tunisia’s state news agency reported that at least 13 officers formerly serving the Gaddafi regime fled across the Tunisian border to the town of Dehiba, as rebels took …
U.K. and France Try to Boost Libyan Rebels, But Risk Rupturing NATO
As troops loyal to Col. Muammar Gaddafi continue to pound the rebel-held city of Misratah — leading to hundreds of civilian casualties — British Foreign Secretary William Hague announced April 19 that the U.K. and France were dispatching a joint squad of military advisers to Benghazi, stronghold of the Libyan rebels in the …
Castro’s Resignation: A Look Back at the ‘Vengeful Visionary’
News that Fidel Castro has resigned from the Central Committee of Cuba’s Communist Party isn’t very surprising — slowed by chronic health problems, the 84-year-old has effectively been out of political life since passing over the reins to his brother Raul in 2006. He now looks more familiar to us in a loose track suit than his once …
Obama Wades Back Into the Mideast Peace Process With Little Chance of Success
It might have once seemed safe to assume that facing a difficult reelection year, President Barack Obama would avoid any temptation to wade back into the perilous business of Middle East peacemaking. After all, his previous effort was blown out of the water by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to yield on the question …
Does Pakistan Really Want a Stable Afghanistan?
In recent weeks, ties between Islamabad and Washington have grown more strained than a cup of sickly sweet South Asian chai. A prolonged kerfuffle over Raymond Davis, the American CIA agent who gunned down two Pakistani men allegedly pursuing him in Lahore, sparked protests across the country and triggered a diplomatic crisis that, while …
Cluster Bombs Fall on Misratah While Obama Calls for Regime Change
The New York Times and international NGO Human Rights Watch both confirm that forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi shelled the city of Misratah with cluster bombs, munitions banned by much of the international community. Times reporter C.J. Chivers, currently in Misratah, no stranger to warzones and author of a recent book on the history of …
NATO Members Feud While Gaddafi Forces Batter Misratah
It’s increasingly looking like the only factor capable of resolving the international community’s dilemma in Libya is also the one element to that will never cooperate in finding a solution: Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi himself. Because as the meetings, summits, and declarations of coalition partners come and go, it becomes …
Extraditing Drug Lord Walid Makled: Why Bogotá Snubbed Washington
Is it another sign of Washington’s withering clout in Latin America? Or does it indicate the rule of law’s rising stature in the region? Or will it just let Venezuelan officials who are allegedly in the pockets of drug lords off the hook? When it comes to Colombia’s final decision to extradite alleged narco-kingpin Walid Makled to …
Iraq’s Assault on Camp Ashraf: The Tenuous Life of a Fringe Iranian Faction
Update: The U.N. reported on April 14 that 34 people were killed during the raid on Camp Ashraf last week.
Was ever there a stranger lot than the Mujahedin-e-Khalk Organization? Today its military arm stands braced for the worst in Camp Ashraf, a dusty military base tucked into a corner of a once-welcoming host nation, Iraq, that …
NATO Confronts a Crisis in Libya: Its Air War Has Not Dislodged Gaddafi
The split in NATO over its Libya operation ought to come as no surprise: it’s precisely because of the differences within the alliance over the terms and goals of the mission, and the inevitably limiting effect of the alliance’s consensus-based decisionmaking, that France had been reluctant to cede command to NATO in the first place. But …
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, …