The Internet and social networks are not only less responsible for the Arab Spring than old-fashioned activism, they’re vulnerable to abuse by the states against which Middle-Eastern protesters have been resisting.
WikiLeaks reveals that not only was the murderous Adil Bin Hamlili a double agent for the Taliban and the West, but he double-crossed them.
During the upheavals sweeping the Arab world, a common refrain among hawkish supporters of Israel has been that the Arab street is indifferent to the plight of the Palestinians, and thus the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not at the heart of Middle East troubles. I
During the upheavals sweeping the Arab world, a common refrain among hawkish supporters of Israel has been that the Arab street is indifferent to the plight of the Palestinians, and thus the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not at the heart of Middle East troubles.
It would be nice to see America expand its cache of good will cache to enhance our diplomatic — as opposed to military — capital.
As democratic uprisings have spread across the Middle East in the Arab Spring, the U.S. response has been as notable for its silences as for its selective words and deeds on behalf of the democracy movements in the region.
Muammar Gaddafi is the undead chicken. Bashar al-Assad of Syria and King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain are the unscared monkeys. The United States has shaped its policy toward the evolving situation in the Middle East according to the Chinese proverb of “killing the chicken to scare the monkey.” The Obama administration has intervened in the conflict in Libya with the apparent goal of punishing Gaddafi for cracking down on the emerging protest movement back in February. This intervention was designed to send a message to other autocrats in the region: don’t fire on your unarmed opposition — or else. But the United States and its allies are having problems with the “or else” part of the equation.
The deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Libya hold a mirror up to how much value we put on the lives of Middle-Easterners.
We all owe a debt to Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros for their commitment, however costly, to chronicling man’s inhumanity to man.
The Sixth Crisis by Dana Allin and Steven Simon successfully provides an historical understanding of how the tensions between Israel and the Arab world have shaped the geopolitical realities of the region and influenced a looming crisis over Iranian nuclearization that will have worldwide repercussions.