The latest story from Syria this week, published by The Daily Telegraph, was that Ali Mamlouk, the head of Syria’s…
Author: Michael Young
President Bashar Assad’s regime is beginning to crumble despite assistance from Iran and its allies. However, such a prospect did…
The remarks Tuesday by Hezbollah parliamentarian Hasan Fadlallah, deriding the Special Tribunal for Lebanon “as a scandalous breach of Lebanese…
Bashar Assad’s smugness in a series of recent interviews may be justified. As the Syrian president looks around him, he…
In his State of the Union address Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama mentioned Syria only twice. On both occasions he…
If there is anything pure, unadulterated, transcendent in Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s his vulgarity. The corpses were still warm last week…
So great are the worries that Sunni-Shiite relations may deteriorate in Lebanon, that everyone embraces the impending dialogue between the…
The killing of six soldiers near Ras Baalbek Tuesday concealed a broader political message, one with significant implications for Hezbollah:…
The next time a presidential campaign tries to convince you that its candidate has foreign policy experience by virtue of…
President Barack Obama’s attitude toward the Syrian conflict is the equivalent of wanting to win the lottery without buying a…
The rising number of attacks against the Lebanese Army in Arsal and northern Lebanon is a worrying reminder of what…
There is a proverb that if you sit by the river long enough, you will eventually see the body of…
The reversal suffered by the Islamic State, formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, at Mosul dam has…
There are several versions of what happened in Arsal last Saturday. But whichever one applies, the Army must avoid being…
As Iran continues to absorb its recent setbacks in Iraq, one place where both the Islamic Republic and Saudi Arabia…
It was obvious several years ago, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was Iran’s president and the Islamic Republic was expanding its power…
In his excellent book “A Line in the Sand,” on the Franco-British rivalry in the Middle East, James Barr quotes…
There has been much speculation in Beirut about how to get Lebanon out of its presidential impasse. The focus has…
It has become obvious in recent days that much of the speculation about whether Saad Hariri would order his parliamentary…
Whether one agrees with Beshara Rai’s decision to visit Israel and greet the pope, or disagrees, the Maronite patriarch appears…
Samir Geagea has declared his candidacy for the Lebanese presidential election, launching a thousand speculations. The Lebanese Forces leader has…
The recent denigration of President Michel Sleiman by Ibrahim Amin, the editor of Al-Akhbar, is part of Hezbollah’s larger fight…
Apparently, a girl who exposes her breasts can agitate some Lebanese much more than a man who clubs his wife…
It’s difficult to identify anything the United States has done right in Syria. For most Americans, including President Barack Obama,…
“I carry in me a great cemetery,” says the main character in Mustapha Khalifeh’s novel “Al-Qawqaa,” (The Shell). “At night…
Saturday evening, while walking in Sassine Square, I came upon a nauseating scene. Two young men had gotten out of…
Reading the bulletins of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, it seems that about the only thing the institution has not…
When listening to many Syrian Christians, or their Lebanese brethren, you would think that only Christians are suffering from the…
The Russian-sponsored agreement to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international supervision may well have headed off an impending American strike…
There was a distinct mood change in Washington Tuesday, as congressional leaders supported President Barack Obama’s proposal to retaliate against…
Since the start of the Arab uprisings in 2011, commentators have reached for their history books to announce that we…
Pity Edward Snowden. He was accused of revealing valuable information allowing terrorist groups to learn that the United States was…
The political isolation of President Vladimir Putin at the G-8 summit in Ireland was a noteworthy moment in the Syrian…
It’s been 10 days since Pope Benedict XVI left Beirut, but his portraits still hang along Lebanon’s roads. That is…
It never ceases to amaze how Arab eyes are forever on the lookout for some manifestation of Western hegemonic intent…
One of the mysterious subtexts of the current uprising in Syria is how the Alawite community will react once they…
We can take it as a given that for as long as Michel Aoun can take a full breath without…
Few political debates are more divisive than the one over whether a country is in a civil war. When the…
How do libertarians everywhere respond to the so-called Arab Spring? For a political and social movement that coalesces around the…
The fighting in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli in recent days has been intimately related to the conflict in…
Toward the end of the lengthy debate on Wednesday night between France’s presidential candidates, President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Socialist…
The American commentator Thomas L. Friedman was in Beirut this week and had two interesting things to say about the…
Pity Ali Shaaban for the hypocrisy that surrounded the reactions to his death. From Hezbollah we heard that the cameraman’s…
It has been a busy few weeks for the Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea. On Wednesday he dodged a bullet—in…
What a shock it must have been for Kofi Annan to realize that the Syrian regime and opposition agree over…
You have to wonder what the Maronite Church and the Vatican were thinking when they replaced the old but smoothly…
The administration of President Barack Obama has often been ridiculed for what it describes as “leading from behind.” More often…
This past week several British parliamentarians were in Beirut to learn more about the situation in Lebanon and Syria. They…
‘A spectre is haunting Europe,” wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, “the spectre of communism.” The…
A few weeks ago, as Army Day and Independence Day approached, someone, no doubt at the instigation of a pushy…