Pepe Escobar | RT | No one in Western corporate media will tell you why US President Barack Obama is hitting Riyadh with a high-powered delegation to “pay his respects” to the new House of Saud potentate, King Salman. Talk about a who’s who – including CIA head John Brennan; General Lloyd Austin, head of…
Binoy Kampmark | Global Research | January 24, 2015 What a spanner in the works of international relations he proved to be. The late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud of Saudi Arabia was always the spoiler in the morality plays of Western powers keen to back him. Oil was always the greatest deterrent against getting on…
Kalili al-Anani | Foreign Affairs | 4 Dec 2014 The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has officially entered Egypt. On November 10, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, a militant movement that operates out of the northern Sinai Peninsula, pledged allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The group, which emerged after the 2011…
RT | 7 Dec 2014 The bloody conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Libya are the result of the interference by the US, which wants to gain control over the rich natural resources of those countries, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir told RT. “The people in Sudan believe that the since the fall of the Soviet Union…
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard | The Telegraph | 30 Nov 2014 Saudi Arabia and the core Opec states are taking an immense political gamble by letting crude oil prices crash to $66 a barrel, if their aim is to shake out the weakest shale producers in the US. A deep slump in prices might equally heighten geostrategic…
By Eric Margolis | ICH | 23 Nov 2014 Sir John Baggot Glubb, better known as Glubb Pasha, was one of the modern Mideast’s most colorful and romantic figures. He and ‘Chinese’ Gordon of Khartoum were the last of the great British imperial officers. Seconded by Britain to its protectorate, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,…
By Bruce Gagnon | Global Research | November 20, 2014 The American revolution was supposed to have happened because of the revulsion our ‘founding fathers’ had with the institution of ‘divine right of kings’ or monarchy. Supposedly the new American nation went to war with England because a revolutionary ‘democracy’ was the preferred way of organizing our…
Myriam Francois-Cerrah | The New Statesman | 13 Nov 2014 What transforms Ancient Texts into radical handbooks for justifying mass murder? The political conditions under which they are being read … Look beyond the smokescreen of Islamic “essence” when analysing the motives of Islamic State. In a “post-ideological” West, the “East” is persistently filtered through the…
Robert Mendick | The Telegraph | 16 Nov 2014 Two of al-Qaeda’s most senior financiers are living with impunity in Qatar despite being on a worldwide terrorism blacklist, the American official in charge of sanctions has disclosed. The revelation casts serious doubt on the Gulf state’s insistence that it does not support terrorists, including jihadists…
By Dan Glazebrook | Middle East Eye | 10 Nov 2014 Three years ago, in late October 2011, the world witnessed the final defeat of the Libyan Jamahiriya – the name by which the Libyan state was known until overthrown in 2011, meaning literally the “state of the masses” – in the face of a…