by Jim Lobe and Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, May 18 2013 (IPS) – A nuclear-armed Iran would not pose a fundamental threat to the United States and its regional allies like Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, according to a new report released here Friday by the Rand Corporation.
Entitled “Iran After the Bomb: [...]
via Lobe Log
by Mitchell Plitnick
The new Israeli government features a security braintrust that might be a bit more reasonable on Iran, but is likely to be even more hawkish both in the immediate region and within the country itself. Gone are voices from the Israeli right who favored a more reasoned [...]
via Lobe Log
by Mitchell Plitnick
All was not as it seemed during President Barack Obama’s appearances in Jerusalem and Ramallah, where he addressed audiences of Israelis and Palestinians. On the surface, it looked like Obama was swearing fealty to Israel, and pledging unconditional US support for any and all Israeli actions. But a [...]
via Lobe Log
by Charles Naas
Not even a month in office, Secretary of State John Kerry took his first official trip to the troubled Middle East and immediately felt first-hand the pressures and metamorphosing power relationships in the region. He began his visit with a meeting in Rome with countries that provide assistance to [...]
via Lobe Log
Lobe Log contributor Emile Nakhleh, an expert on political Islam and Middle Eastern society, recently provided a fascinating primer on Bahrain to the Bahrain Mirror (Arabic version), an e-newspaper run by Bahraini dissidents. As discussed in the Mirror’s introduction, prior to becoming the CIA’s former chief regional analyst, Dr. [...]
via Lobe Log
The bad news about Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s expanding constitutional powers in Egypt is the threat of another dictatorship in Egypt. The good news is that normal politics is returning to Egypt after decades of brutal authoritarian regimes.
Recent mass demonstrations in support of and opposition to Morsi’s new draft constitution [...]
via Lobe Log
Only 1% of the world stood by US-Israeli rejection of President Mahmoud Abbas’ request for non-member state status, which puts Palestine on par with the Vatican and allows Palestinian claims to be filed in the International Criminal Court. Lobe Log’s Mitchell Plitnick reported at the time on the politics [...]
via Lobe Log
You will not hear me say this often, but Hossein Shariatmadari — Iran’s irascible and intractable editor of the hardline Kayhan daily — makes one important point in this editorial. Although a few months ago Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei referred in general terms to the fact that Iran had been [...]
via Lobe Log
By Richard Javad Heydarian
The recent war in Gaza has been portrayed as a political dividend for the main protagonists, namely Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Egypt’s Mohammad Morsi, and the Hamas leadership in Gaza, despite the tremendous psychological, infrastructural and humanitarian costs borne by innocent civilians, especially the Palestinians.
As Hamas and [...]
via Lobe Log
When I was living in Cairo, the transition to winter was sometimes smooth. The beastly oven of summer changed slowly into a bearable fall of cool-warm. The fall moved from the cool-warm to a few weeks of cold, or at least what was cold to Egypt. These were smooth changes. It [...]
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