To better understand the assassination of General Francois Hajj on Wednesday morning in Baabda, one has to view it against…
Author: Michael Young
In late 1994, I interviewed Michel Aoun at his borrowed residence at La Haute-Maison just outside Paris. At the end…
Lebanon is looking into the abyss; it is in the throes of a political crisis that everyone has announced might…
Those of us who welcomed the naming of Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister of France are wearing a hair shirt…
For a long time and until 2003, the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya was a critical filter through which supporters of…
Maybe someone might convincingly explain why, whenever Western journalists and publicists talk about Lebanon’s Christians, particularly the Maronites, they invariably…
Bashar Assad, never a man to accept conditions, is nevertheless imposing some of his own on the United States. In…
The two-month period to elect a new president has begun, and not surprisingly it started with a deal. On Tuesday,…
Recently, amid reports that Hizbullah was creating closed-off security zones north of the Litani River and establishing a system of…
Half of politics is being there; the other half is knowing what to do once you are there. Many of…
On Monday, the dean of Lebanese journalists, Ghassan Tueni, wrote a column in Al-Nahar that turns much else written on…
Nicolas Sarkozy is as pro-American a president as France will ever have. But when he was received last Saturday at…
So, Michel Aoun’s candidate won. If the general knew any better, he would realize that Camille Khoury’s victory doomed any…
The United States plans to sell Gulf countries at least $20 billion worth of military hardware in the coming years,…
All the signs are that the voting will go ahead in the Metn by-election this coming Sunday. However, partisans of…
Michel Aoun has taken a risk in deciding to contest the Metn by-election against the former president, Amine Gemayel. Mediation…
These have been traumatic weeks for the White House, as its strategy of holding the fort on Iraq is turning…
July 14 was the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in France. A day later, last Sunday, French Foreign…
It says something that one year after the summer 2006 war, we’re not sure whether to celebrate Hizbullah’s “divine victory”…
In his remarkable book, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore does a service by focusing on…
After the attack against a Spanish patrol two Sundays ago, Spain’s military began cooperating with Hizbullah in the investigation to…
For those following events in South Lebanon, the deadly attack on Sunday against soldiers of the Spanish contingent of UNIFIL…
Many Lebanese, particularly in the majority camp, have been preoccupied with the court being set up to try suspects in…
Negotiations to create a new national-unity government have hit a brick wall, and that’s a relief. The opposition’s conditions for…
In his 2007 essay What’s Left?, Nick Cohen wonders how it is that many on the political left have lost…
It is a coincidence, but a useful one, that on the 40th anniversary of an Arab-Israeli war that prompted the…
Last week, while being driven through Chicago, I heard one Flynt Leverett speaking in a news report aired on National…
There are few pleasures these days as Lebanon descends into the kind of violence that Syria seems to manufacture so…
No sooner had Condoleezza Rice finished shaking hands with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem last week at the Sharm el-Sheikh…
BY MICHAEL YOUNG, BEIRUT–This week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is meeting in the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh with…
Daily Star staff It’s never easy to discern movement in the midst of glacial stalemate, but the ice has definitely…
What is it about the blogosphere that can transform perfectly credible academics into unethical hit men? The object of my…
Jacques Chirac still has some weeks left in office, but as of this Sunday, when France votes in the first…
Michael Young As France prepares to vote in the first round of its presidential election on April 22, an indispensable…
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s speech on Sunday formalized Hizbullah’s divorce from the rest of Lebanese society, confirming there is a fundamental…
We can thank the US speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for having informed Syrian President Bashar Assad, from Beirut,…
Add Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht to the list of dignitaries who have left Damascus biting their fists in…
It’s become a habit to greet whatever journalist Seymour Hersh writes with reverence. However, after his ludicrous claim last summer…
Earlier this week, two statements neatly summarized the crisis in Lebanon. The first came from the EU’s representative in Beirut,…
Recently, from his perch at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, Germany’s former foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, wrote a commentary warning…
In March 2005, Samir Kassir wrote a column titled, “Beirut, the springtime of the Arabs.” Martyrs Square was then awash…
So today is a “day of change,” to quote Suleiman Franjieh. He could be right. That’s because, as of tomorrow,…