The Wikileaks dump will supposedly demonstrate U.S. support for the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, a separatist organization that has been fighting the Turkish state for the past thirty years.
Which is the larger threat to the Middle-East? Iran’s nuclear ambitions or more American military action.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has been at the heart of regional affairs since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. This is the context wherein the “de facto” Iran-Turkey-Syria axis should be understood, although substantive normalization of relations in the last decade between Turkey and its neighbors Iran and Syria served as a pre-requisite for the supposed alliance.
Nearly lost in the furor over the Israeli attack on the Turkish civilian aid flotilla is an incredible assessment delivered to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “Israel is turning from an asset to the United States to a burden,” testified Meir Dagan, the director of Mossad, on June 1.
When U.S. forces found themselves beset by a growing insurgency in Iraq following their lighting overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the most obvious parallel that came to mind was Vietnam: an occupying army, far from home, besieged by a shadowy foe. But Patrick Cockburn, the Independent’s (UK) ace Middle East reporter, suggested that the escalating chaos was more like the Boer War than the conflict in Southeast Asia.
The future is no longer in plastics, as the businessman in the 1967 film The Graduate insisted. Rather, the future is in China.
Last year, Lauren Rosenberg was walking across a four-lane highway in Utah when she was hit by a car. Now she’s suing Google for $100,000 in damages because Google Maps told her to take that route.
The U.S. State Department’s claim that the “international community” is behind the U.S. is increasingly sounding like whistling past the graveyard.
“I need a little space.”
When lovers utter these words, it’s usually a bad sign for the relationship. They feel suffocated. They’re reexamining their commitment. They’re checking out other options. But they don’t have the courage to make a clean break.
Turkey’s constitutional court banned the country’s only pro-Kurdish party on December 11. Likely to result in an increased number of ethnic conflicts across the country, the decision is both typical and paradoxical.