Friday, September 22, 2023

Let the Bells Toll

Lebanon is at a crossroads, again. Some cynics say that there are no roads left, and lesser crosses than in the past, to even mention crossroads. Such wordplay is not mere humor but a reality in a country where sectarian divisions have reached new heights and calls for division or secession or federation, or anything else than the failed centralized State, are multiplying.  A most puzzling part of this jigsaw rem...

Rumors of peace ….are just that

The Biden administration is floating a rumor regarding an imminent Saudi Israeli peace deal and that for several reasons, none of them being persuasive or remotely convincing. Some US sources claim that Netanyahu finds himself in a bin with the ongoing judicial reforms and is desperately seeking a big win on the diplomatic front. Other sources speculate that MBS cannot remain outside the Abraham Accords for too long beca...

Vichy and Lebanon, faces of the same coin.

When France surrendered to Germany in the early period of WWII, the most decorated officer of the French army Phillipe Petain, made a conscientious (though treacherous) decision to execute the Armistice Accords with the Nazis on June 22, 1940. His, was logic that France needed to prevent millions of deaths after the heavy toll it endured against the Germans on the Western front during WWI. Petain’s action would become a ...

America’s Dilemma in the Middle East

“To stay, or not to stay”, that is the question. That could be a passage from Hamlet, paraphrased by U.S. strategists when reviewing their next moves on the Middle East chessboard. When the U.S. inherited the colonial crown of the British Empire, especially after WW II, it did not bargain for the liabilities that came with it. Great Britain had forcibly relinquished its influence over the region but not before planting s...

A cry for Rome, before the Fall …. 

America is not losing to its foreign enemies, rather it is falling victim to its self-inflicted, domestic wounds. Ever since Barrack Obama’s presidency came to the fore, we have witnessed a rhetoric in America scarcely seen before. A loathing for what America stands for, on all counts. Not that the U.S. is infallible or that its system is a beacon to the world, but the amount of anger, of contempt and of hatred that t...