The death of remarkable Australian mountaineer Lincoln Hall from mesothelioma last month, at the age of just 56, has brought back into sharp focus the deadly properties of asbestos. Hall was a man so tough…
Category: Mid-East
Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted…
…and it’s potentially beneficial for peace in the region Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of high-yield weapons by two opposing sides…
In the last month, there was an accumulation of odd news items concerning German humiliation by Israel, culminating with two truly odd affairs. German Nobel laureate Gunter Grass was declared persona non grata in Israel,…
Reuters and other foreign media are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to film or take pictures in Tehran (Reuters/Caren Firouz) Iran has halted oil sales to Greece in response to the EU sanctions…
In international diplomacy, when scheduling a major event on which issues of war and peace are pegged and that date is just a week away, and if you still don’t know the venue, you’re indeed…
[anyplayer:url=http://rt.com/files/news/deadline-ceasefire-assad-peace-659/ie415819b6a723ea9319ae9d600fef63e_peter-oliver-updated-live.flv] Damascus says it has started pulling troops from cities to meet deadlines set by UN envoy Kofi Annan. But as the Syrian opposition claims bloodshed is continuing, Annan has been forced to defend his…
There is one thing certain about U.S. Pentagon strategy: it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. And using an old trick from Operation Desert Storm, establishing a humanitarian, NATO-protected no-fly salient in northern Iraq’s Kurdish area, appears to be the same strategy envisioned for northern Syria. There is much in common between the U.S.-led NATO planning for a northern Syria occupation zone and the no-fly zone established in 1992 for Iraq. Both NATO operations were and are intended to drive Arab Ba’ath Socialist regimes from power. In Iraq, the target was the Ba’ath Party headed by Saddam Hussein; in Syria, the target is, again, an Arab Ba’ath Party and the regime headed by Bashar Al Assad. In Iraq, a no-fly zone was established from the 36th parallel north to the Turkish border. If one were top draw that same boundary westward, it closely compares to the NATO-protected humanitarian zone being proposed for Syria. The NATO-protected northern Syria salient would encompass the cities of Aleppo and Idlib and the provinces of Idlib, Halab, Ar Raqqah, and Al Hasakah (the latter two where many Syrian Kurds live).
Turkey begins fabricating “cross border” incidents to justify Brookings prescribed “safe havens” inside Syria. From the very beginning, US policy makers admitted that Kofi Annan’s “peace mission” to Syria was nothing more than a rouse…
Iran has slammed world powers for imposing preconditions ahead of Saturday’s nuclear talks. The foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, stressed on Monday that “setting conditions before the meeting means drawing conclusions before negotiations.” “None…