The Qatari-based tribal-owned network, al-Jazeera’s news broadcast on February 16 about Libya was revealing. It started with a report on the mayhem that has gripped Libya since the capture and brutal murder of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi on October 20, 2011. Without showing any footage of the brutality perpetrated by various militias against civilians, the network switched to an episode of 16 years ago to tell viewers how terrible Qaddafi’s rule was.
The self-proclaimed superpower is clutching at straws about “peace talks” following the Taliban’s convincing defeat of US-NATO armies in Afghanistan. While talk about talks has gone on for years with American officials — civilian and military — making bold pronouncements about commencement of “secret talks”, only to discover that some goat herder or a petty bicycle shop owner had taken the “smart” Americans for a long ride, the latter have not given up.
Merely a year ago Turkey enjoyed much respect among neighbors and established warm and cordial relations with them, helping to catapult Ankara’s political, economic and cultural objectives. Frequent visits to neighboring countries by Turkish delegations, usually accompanied by senior government officials including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, signing memorandums of understanding and agreements, increasing trade and political as well as military cooperation, heralded a new era for the conflict-torn region.
After the Age of Reaganomics and the decline of participatory democracy in the United States, presidential elections have become a TV sport rather than a mass political practice. In hotly contested elections such as George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000, the turnout is a mere 50% of eligible voters. As the US officially transitions to a corporatocracy, though, it appears that even an apathetic voter population is far too dangerous to entrust with the country’s political decision-making.
The enterprise of US perpetual war is confronted with a persistent problem. Spiraling rates of psychological and social problems in returning war veterans is placing enormous stress on the narratives that the US government has constructed around the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The crisis in Syria has entered a stalemate with neither side able to deliver a decisive knockout blow. This may serve the regime better than its opponents although it is not for lack of trying by the opposition, especially aided by their foreign sponsors and backers. The major hurdle facing the regime’s opponents — and there are divergent groups — is that they are disunited.
As human rights campaigners around the world commemorated the 10th anniversary of the opening of the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, marking a decade of human rights abuses known as the “war on terror”, one would have expected that Western governments would be contemplating scaling back their aggressive rhetoric and draconian laws which have become a feature of the 21st century.
Occupy Wall Street, the national protests that were sparked in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2001, headlined the anger of the 99% whose futures have been derailed by the financial elites of the country and their political executors. While uneasily tolerating the mushrooming protests for a month, all the while investing in elaborate security systems to protect their wealth and holdings from mass anger, Wall Street called in the national authority to pull the plug.
A charismatic politician charming crowds throughout Pakistan. A rising crescendo of political speeches and rallies setting the nation afire, an impalpable sense of excitement building in the populace, casting the halo of destiny itself on the celebrity politician. A sense of promise, a social contract written anew; Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1973? No, rather it is Imran Khan in 2012, launching a flamboyant path to become the next prime minister of Pakistan.
With his December 12 outburst against niqab, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney confirmed that the rightwing government he serves is rabidly Islamophobic. This is not the first time Kenney and other members of the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper have attacked Muslims.
In the post-9/11 theatrics of George W. Bush, one of the more memorable is his explanation for why the dastardly terrorists chose to attack the glorious symbols of US power: “They hate us for our freedoms,” or in another version, “They hate us for our civilization.”
Russia’s grip on the North Caucasus is becoming more complicated and therefore, loosening up as a consequence of recent developments.
Who says the Americans hate all the Haqqanis? Take the case of Husain Haqqani, the recently disgraced Pakistani ambassador to Washington, who was such a darling of the Washington neocons that he was publicly feted as a close ally.
Pakistan’s relations with the US have never been easy but recent developments have brought them to such a point that even the polite and usually soft-spoken Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani was forced to concede: “we do not trust the Americans.”
Pakistan’s boycott of the December 5 US-sponsored conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany reduced it to little more than a farce. It was like a wedding without the groom. Pakistan boycotted to protest the November 26 US-NATO attack.
Ultimately, even the great rhetorical skills of Barack Obama could not hide the fact that the US military had been defeated in Iraq. American troops sneaked out of the country into Kuwait on December 15, a full two weeks ahead of the stipulated deadline.
It is now well established that foreign powers are deeply involved in destabilizing the regime of Bashar al-Asad in Syria. Such interference is not confined merely to anti-regime propaganda, although it plays a significant role by presenting misleading reports about civilian casualties to stoke anti-regime sentiment.
Exactly a year after peoples’ uprisings shook the Muslim East (Middle East) driving three dictators from power, considerable uncertainty still prevails. Elections have been held in Tunisia (October 23), Morocco (November 25) and Egypt (November 28–29; December 14–15 and the next round scheduled for January 9–10, 2012), but they have failed to stem unrest.
The Saudi regime has adopted a three-pronged strategy to deal with the storm that has erupted since the Islamic Awakening swept the Muslim East more than a year ago. Soon after two dictators — General Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and General Hosni Mubarak of Egypt — were driven from power in quick succession, Saudi King Abdullah announced billions of dollars in handouts to buy people’s loyalty.
Weeks before the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report was released on November 8, Western media outlets had already worked themselves into frenzy, drum-beating about how Iran would be found in “violation” of its nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations by secretly diverting material to make the bomb.
