Bashar Assad’s perilous dance with Iran
The latest story from Syria this week, published by The Daily Telegraph, was that Ali…
Author Michael Young
The beginning of the end in Syria
President Bashar Assad’s regime is beginning to crumble despite assistance from Iran and its allies.…
A tribunal on the road to Damascus?
The remarks Tuesday by Hezbollah parliamentarian Hasan Fadlallah, deriding the Special Tribunal for Lebanon “as…
Why Bashar Assad appears so smug
Bashar Assad’s smugness in a series of recent interviews may be justified. As the Syrian…
America’s Syria plan is bound to fail
In his State of the Union address Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama mentioned Syria only…
Israel’s shameless hijacking of French Jews
If there is anything pure, unadulterated, transcendent in Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s his vulgarity. The corpses…
What Future and Hezbollah should discuss
So great are the worries that Sunni-Shiite relations may deteriorate in Lebanon, that everyone embraces…
Politically, the Army gains on Hezbollah
The killing of six soldiers near Ras Baalbek Tuesday concealed a broader political message, one…
The U.S. is crippled in the Middle East
The next time a presidential campaign tries to convince you that its candidate has foreign…
U.S. diffidence in Syria means failure
President Barack Obama’s attitude toward the Syrian conflict is the equivalent of wanting to win…
The Army is being sucked into Syria
The rising number of attacks against the Lebanese Army in Arsal and northern Lebanon is…
Obama’s ‘no troops’ vow is unrealistic
There is a proverb that if you sit by the river long enough, you will…
Iraq requires a long U.S. attention span
The reversal suffered by the Islamic State, formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater…
The Army must not enter Syria’s war
There are several versions of what happened in Arsal last Saturday. But whichever one applies,…
The limits of Hezbollah’s conciliation
As Iran continues to absorb its recent setbacks in Iraq, one place where both the…
How our region is preparing for suicide
It was obvious several years ago, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was Iran’s president and the Islamic…
What Mosul could mean for Obama
In his excellent book “A Line in the Sand,” on the Franco-British rivalry in the…
On the presidency, look at Hezbollah
There has been much speculation in Beirut about how to get Lebanon out of its…
Brace yourself for Aoun’s frustration
It has become obvious in recent days that much of the speculation about whether Saad…
The winters of our Maronite patriarch
Whether one agrees with Beshara Rai’s decision to visit Israel and greet the pope, or…
The presidential chess game has begun
Samir Geagea has declared his candidacy for the Lebanese presidential election, launching a thousand speculations.…
Hezbollah’s presidential headaches grow
The recent denigration of President Michel Sleiman by Ibrahim Amin, the editor of Al-Akhbar, is…
Why the shameless can’t take topless
Apparently, a girl who exposes her breasts can agitate some Lebanese much more than a…
Obama’s Syria policy is disintegrating
It’s difficult to identify anything the United States has done right in Syria. For most…
Give Syria’s dead a chance to speak out
“I carry in me a great cemetery,” says the main character in Mustapha Khalifeh’s novel…
Lebanon is no country for young men
Saturday evening, while walking in Sassine Square, I came upon a nauseating scene. Two young…
A world of humanitarian indifference
Reading the bulletins of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, it seems that about the only…
Cassocks fly over Syria
When listening to many Syrian Christians, or their Lebanese brethren, you would think that only…
Moscow saves Assad’s bacon, for now
The Russian-sponsored agreement to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international supervision may well have headed…
It may be curtains for Bashar Assad
There was a distinct mood change in Washington Tuesday, as congressional leaders supported President Barack…
Sykes-Picot is more alive than we know
Since the start of the Arab uprisings in 2011, commentators have reached for their history…
The embassies should have stayed open
Pity Edward Snowden. He was accused of revealing valuable information allowing terrorist groups to learn…
Russia may lose its strong Syria card
The political isolation of President Vladimir Putin at the G-8 summit in Ireland was a…
Mideast’s religious minorities approach point of no return
It’s been 10 days since Pope Benedict XVI left Beirut, but his portraits still hang…
When imperialists happen to be Muslim
It never ceases to amaze how Arab eyes are forever on the lookout for some…
Do the Assads fear Alawite anger?
One of the mysterious subtexts of the current uprising in Syria is how the Alawite…
Aoun, or when tragedy becomes farce
We can take it as a given that for as long as Michel Aoun can…
Must we admit to a civil war in Syria?
Few political debates are more divisive than the one over whether a country is in…
Collective rights came with a cost for the individual
How do libertarians everywhere respond to the so-called Arab Spring? For a political and social…
Syria lets loose a bogeyman on Tripoli’s troubled streets
The fighting in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli in recent days has been intimately…
Sarko d’Arabie
Toward the end of the lengthy debate on Wednesday night between France’s presidential candidates, President…
Blank Barack
The American commentator Thomas L. Friedman was in Beirut this week and had two interesting…
Syria’s border blackmail may backfire
Pity Ali Shaaban for the hypocrisy that surrounded the reactions to his death. From Hezbollah…
Two bullets and a ballot
It has been a busy few weeks for the Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea. On…
Annan’s plan should be regime change
What a shock it must have been for Kofi Annan to realize that the Syrian…
Bkirki offers us dictatorship on Rai
You have to wonder what the Maronite Church and the Vatican were thinking when they…
Washington’s Syria policy is imaginary
The administration of President Barack Obama has often been ridiculed for what it describes as…
Do discard the ‘resistance axis’ hoax
This past week several British parliamentarians were in Beirut to learn more about the situation…
An ideology has taken on life of its own in these uprisings
‘A spectre is haunting Europe,” wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto,…
Military man
A few weeks ago, as Army Day and Independence Day approached, someone, no doubt at…