President Barack Obama is being lambasted by US Republicans for admitting that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with the rise of the militant group, ISIS, or Islamic State, as it’s now known. Given that the US had made an unbelievable mess of its Mideast...

The alleged beheading of freelance journalist James Foley by the shadowy ISIS (or Islamic State) has sparked outrage and horror around the globe. I say “alleged” because we are not sure if the decapitation was real or faked. After three decades of covering wars in the...

Russia and the West are at war – over fruits, veggies, pork, and bank loans. The cause is Ukraine, a vast emptiness formerly unknown to the western world, but now deemed a vital national security interest worthy of a risking a very scary war. Economic embargos such as...

In 1956, Britain and France were convinced that Egypt’s charismatic nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was threatening what was left of their Mideast and African colonial empires. London branded Nasser, “Hitler on the Nile.” So the British and French governments...

Israel is clearly winning the David v. Goliath struggle with Palestinians in Gaza. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seized on the murder in June of three Jewish teenagers from a West Bank settlement to launch Israel’s third war against Gaza in six years....

Just how independent is the European Union? Given recent events involving the United States and its European allies, one really must wonder.First, there was the US National Security Agency brazenly tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private cellphone and, very...

Former French president Nicholas Sarkozy’s dramatic criminal interrogation last week shows once again that the politics of the French Republic remain waist-deep in sewage. It was also an affront and humiliation of a former – and would be future – French president....

The late Saddam Hussein was certainly right when he predicted that America’s invasion of Iraq would become “the Mother of All Battles.” Eleven years later, it continues. This week saw the collapse of two divisions of Iraq’s government army, a full 30,000 men running...

Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin were ships passing in the night while in Paris for the G-7 meeting. The American president reportedly refused to dine with Putin, who was being hosted by France’s president Francois Hollande as part of the D-Day...

Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin usually wears a perfect poker face. But last week in Shangahi, the icy-cold Russian president came awfully close to bursting into a big grin.And why not? Putin had just stolen a march on his western rivals. The US-British attempt to...

Did anyone really think that John Kerry’s nine-month effort to produce a Palestinian mini-state would ever work? If so, they were either ignorant of the Mideast, naïve, or deeply cynical. The best one could say about Kerry’s fiasco was that it was a charade designed...

Marbella, Spain – Here in Spain’s sunny south, you wouldn’t know that a new world war over Eastern Europe threatens. In fact, rumor has it that none other than Vlad Putin is house-shopping in this glamorous resort. Easter is Europe’s most important holiday. While...

"Where is Ukraine?"A century ago, crowds in Paris were cheering, “on to Berlin!” Crowds in Berlin cried, “on to Paris.” World War I, the supreme example of nationalist/militaristic stupidity, was about to begin.One hundred years later we hear cries across America to...

Afghanistan’s national election held this week is a sham. A group of candidates, handpicked by the US, will pretend to compete in an election whose outcome has already been determined – by Washington.The candidates include US groomed politicians, and drug-dealing...

As Syria lies dying, western media cries, “we must save Syria’s suffering children.” Indeed so, among Syria’s nine million internal and external refugees, some 450,000 are children. All civil wars are bloody and cruel, but Syria’s strife has reached new extremes of...

Soviet leader Josef Stalin used to shrug off critics by his favorite Central Asian saying: “The dogs bark; the caravan moves on.” Russia’s hard-eyed president, Vladimir Putin, is following the same strategy over Ukraine and Crimea. Putin swiftly moved his knight into...

Sochi seems a strange place to hold the Olympic games. First, it’s almost subtropical. To find snow, one must travel up to the Caucasus mountains. The Black Sea resort is charming and exotic. But Sochi is a beach resort. No one knows if there will be enough snow for...

How did al-Qaeda, a tiny anti-Communist group in Afghanistan that had no more than 200 active members in 2001 become a supposed worldwide threat? How can al-Qaeda be all over the Mideast, North Africa, and now much of black Africa? This after the US spent over $1...

Where are the world’s most dangerous places in 2014?*Mostly forgotten, but the highly dangerous, Indian-controlled portion of disputed Kashmir. Rebellion against Indian rule by Kashmir’s majority Muslims is again boiling. Over 1.6 million Indian and Pakistani troops,...

Those wondering what lies in store for Afghanistan need only look at the way the British Empire ruled Iraq in the 1920’s. As Shakespeare wrote, “what is past is prologue.” Imperial Britain created the state of Iraq after World War I to secure Mesopotamia’s vast oil...