Syria
الجمهورية العربية السورية
There Are Now Three Syrias
Ben Hubbard, New York Times
The U.S. Obsession with 'Shaping' World Events
Dan Larison, The Week
The Imminent Hezbollah-Nusra War
Hanin Ghaddar, NOW Lebanon
U.S. Syria Action Could Sway Iran on Nukes
M. O'Sullivan, Bloomberg
A Strong Iran Is Good for U.S.
Robert Kaplan & Kamran Bokhari, Stratfor
The black flag of jihad flies over much of northern Syria. In the center of the country, pro-government militias and Hezbollah fighters battle those who threaten their communities....(full article)
Despite increasing demands for U.S. military involvement in the Syrian conflict, there is still little chance that the Obama administration will commit the U.S. to a new war in the...(full article)
The Syrian Salafist group Jabhat Al-Nusra declared in Jordan that it has set the confrontation with Hezbollah militants in Syria as a top priority. Jordan-based al-Qaeda-affiliate ...(full article)
Air strikes against Syrian targets, in challenging this Iranian assumption, could help address the fundamental flaw in the current effort to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions through...(full article)
Iran, with its nearly 76 million people, is the second-most populous country in the Middle East after Egypt, while its level of education and bureaucratic institutionalization is h...(full article)
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Most Recent Articles
Syria's Rebels Send the Wrong Message - The National
Can a single image summarise the horrors of a war? One only has to recall the photograph of children running from a napalm attack in South Vietnam, in 1972, to know that it can....
The Problem with Comparing Syria to Rwanda - Greg Scoblete, RCW
As the Syrian civil war grinds on, proponents of getting the United States involved have resorted to moral condemnations to goad President Obama into action. "Syria may prove to be...
Russia's Arrest Sends Signal on Syria - Alan Philps, The National
The bizarre arrest of a US diplomat in Moscow allegedly caught red-handed while trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer raises more questions than answers. Why was the y...
Lights Are Going Out All Over Lebanon - Michael Karam, The National
It's back to Lebanon and the grinding mediocrity of a country with neither direction nor the guts to take a firm position on the escalating tragedy of the Syrian civil war. Econo...
The Syria War Could Last 10 Years - Michael Totten, Dispatches
I wouldn’t be surprised if Bashar al-Assad falls sometime soon, but I also will not be surprised if the year 2020 rolls around and Syria has all but ceased to exist as a nation...
Syria Tops Erdogan's Agenda - Soner Cagaptay & James Jeffrey, CNN
This week’s summit between President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reflects the extraordinary development of relations between the United States ...
Obama, It's Time to Act on Syria - Rebeccah Heinrichs, RealClearWorld
As evidence mounts that Syrian strongman Bashir al-Assad used chemical weapons on his people, President Barack Obama is attempting to erase his once-firm "red line" on the topic. L...
Israel Debates Which Side to Back in Syria - Jonathan Spyer, Tablet Mag
The civil war in Syria has led to a keen debate among the professional echelon tasked with advising policymakers in Israel. This debate has been reflected in a more subdued public ...
Turkey's Erdogan Is Undone by Obama, Assad - Fouad Ajami, Hoover
The car bombs that killed more than 40 people last weekend in a town in southern Turkey are a reckoning for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He had made himself party to the fi...
Israel Playing a Dangerous Game in Syria - Anne Penketh, The National
It's been 10 days since the Israeli air force attacked a Syrian facility suspected of holding advanced Iranian missiles destined for Hizbollah militants in Lebanon. It was the seco...
Syria Could Be Iran's Vietnam - Thanassis Cambanis, Foreign Policy
By supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to the hilt, Hezbollah and Iran are risking their hard-won reputation as stewards of an anti-Israel and anti-U.S. alliance that trans...
Why Is Assad Killing Along the Coast? - Joshua Landis, Syria Comment
The likelihood of ethnic cleansing in the coastal regions is high. It will rise even higher should Assad’s troops begin to lose. The Sunni populations of the coastal cities will ...
Forget 'Red Lines' - Just Help the Syrian People - Jonathan Kay, Nat'l Post
Instead of focusing on 'red lines' and the like, Western nations should be funding and organizing a proper aid response to a humanitarian disaster that some are describing as one o...
First Conflict of the Post-Superpower Era - John Kampfner, Guardian
For Barack Obama indecision is now strategy: heavy-handed intervention is over. Syria's tragedy is nothing has taken its place....
The West Continues to Appease Assad - The Daily Star
Cameron's comment that no one is benefiting from the trajectory that Syria is taking is blatantly false: Everyone would appear to have an interest in this downward spiral, until th...
Obama's Biggest Mistakes in Syria - Jeffrey Goldberg, Bloomberg
Bashar al-Assad is not the only leader who is crossing 'red lines' these days. U.S. President Barack Obama has also crossed a few. Here are three of them....
European Hawks, American Doves - Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast
Once upon a time, skittish European leaders came to Washington to warn their trigger-happy American counterparts about the dangers of war. Not anymore. Yesterday at the White Hou...
Saudis Overtake Qatar as Syria Sponsor - Hassan Hassan, The National
Saudi authorities had consistently declined to meet the opposition, despite repeated requests. This was partly because the kingdom has opposed Muslim Brotherhood dominance in the...
It's Time for Turkey to Intervene in Syria - Henri Barkey, The National
The Obama administration has so far refused to engage in Syria militarily although the signs are that it may now consider changing its policy, moving towards providing the rebel si...
Has Obama Blown His Credibility & Syria? - Jonathan Mercer, Foreign Aff.
The debate about what to do in Syria has been sidetracked by discussions of credibility and reputation. But both logic and evidence prove that reputations are mostly imaginary. Oba...
Our Syria Myopia - Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast
Still, there’s another, more disturbing, reason that Syria gets so much more ink than Iraq and Afghanistan. American elites aren’t sick of Syria yet. Purely on cost-eff...
Obama Is Making a Brave Call on Syria - Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
In the west, we like our leaders tough and decisive. American presidents are meant to behave like action heroes. That notion was captured in Hillary Clinton’s campaign advertisem...
How Putin Rolled John Kerry on Syria - Michael Weiss, Foreign Policy
The photographs showing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry smiling and slapping palms with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are being circulated by many Syrians opposed to ...
Assad Winning with a Little Help from His Friends - Liz Sly, Wash Post
Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are beginning to turn the tide of the country’s war, bolstered by a new strategy, the support of Iran and Russia and the assistan...
Why on Earth Should the U.S. Fight in Syria? - Barry Rubin, PJ Media
I am amazed at the current U.S. debate over Syria. Those urging intervention may be driven by humanitarian intentions, to end the fighting and ease suffering. But whatever they are...
Why Are Europeans Waging Jihad in Syria? - Teri Schultz, Global Post
A man looks deep into the camera and pleads, in Arabic: "You, there in Europe, watching this video. I'm calling you." With urgency in his voice, he refers to children being murdere...
Pink Line over Damascus - Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
Israel's successful strikes around Damascus show that a Western no-fly zone would not require a massive Libyan-style campaign to take out all Syrian air defenses. Syrian helicopter...
How to Stop Iran's Takeover of Syria - Michael Weiss, NOW Lebanon
It's been edifying to see how quickly the international press has discovered that Syrian air defense systems are not quite so "formidable" as they were once described by senior Pen...
U.S. Should Push for Elections in Syria - Zbigniew Brzezinski, Time
The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddlywinks intervention from around the edges of the conflict -- no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so forth -- would sim...
Why Arming Syria's Rebels Is Still a Bad Idea - The Nation
"Humanitarian" intervention would only deepen the humanitarian disaster....
Why Israel Doesn't Want Assad to Fall - Efraim Halevy, Foreign Affairs
Israeli intervention in Syria's civil war has remained very limited. In part, that is because of Israel's long history with the Assad regime, which has consistently maintained peac...
Drought Is Ripping the Arab World Apart - Mitch Ginsburg, Times of Israel
Syria is 85 percent desert or semi-arid country. But it has several significant waterways. The Euphrates runs in a south-easterly direction through the center of the country to Ira...
On Syria, It's Time for Obama to Be the Decider - Ian Bremmer, Reuters
Through two years of Syrian crisis, the Obama administration has cautiously dragged its feet as the United States is further enmeshed in the conflict. That’s a sensible platf...
Putin: A Man the West Can Do Business With? - Con Coughlin, Telegraph
When David Cameron arrives at the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Friday for talks with Vladimir Putin, he would be well advised to bring a good book with him to while away the time....
Obama Reflex: Doing Nothing Is Always Best - Jennifer Rubin, Right Turn
The Benghazi incident and the Syrian civil war are linked in a number of ways. They are both bloody after-effects of the Arab Spring. They both highlight the spread of jihadists in...
U.S. Credibility Not on the Line in Syria - Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post
We must understand that the Syrian conflict is fundamentally a civil war between a minority elite and the long-oppressed majority -- similar to those in Lebanon and Iraq. People fi...
Obama's Shameful Timidity on Syria - Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic
Seventy thousand people have died in the Syrian war, most of them at the hands of their ruler. Since this number has appeared in the papers for many months, the actual number must ...
Will Iran-Saudi Proxy War Spread to Iraq? - Mohammed Ayoob, Yale
Matters have been made worse in and for Iraq by the fact that, like Syria, Iraq has become a major theater of a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with Turkey pushed by force...
America's Pundit-Powered Foreign Policy - Robert Kaplan, Stratfor
One feels sympathy for U.S. President Barack Obama. Whatever he does in Syria, he is doomed. Had he intervened a year ago, as many pundits demanded, he might presently be in the mi...
On the Verge of a Regional Mideast War - Irish Times
The uncertainty added by the Israeli raids, although sanctioned in advance by the US, complicates President Obama’s predicament by adding to growing pressures on a deeply rel...
What if the U.S. Doesn't Intervene in Syria? - Washington Post
What will unfold in Syria if the Obama administration persists with its policy of providing humanitarian and other non-lethal aid while standing back from the fighting? The most li...
Assad Begins His Bloody Backup Plan - Michael Young, The National
There is seemingly no light at the end of Syria's tunnel, despite the decision of the United States and Russia to organise an international conference on the conflict there, later ...
The New Black Hole of the Mideast - Michael Totten, Dispatches
Until awfully recently, Lebanon was the country in the Eastern Mediterranean that acted as a gravitational black hole that sucked in the neighbors...
Syria Intervention Is in Our Interest - John McCain, Time
I know Americans are war-weary and eager to focus on our domestic and economic problems, not foreign affairs. I also know the situation in Syria is complex and there are no ideal o...
Forget About Syria, Worry About China - Edward Luttwak, Foreign Policy
It is now argued most authoritatively that U.S. President Barack Obama has failed to act decisively to remove Bashar al-Assad's regime from power in Syria because of internal divis...