Middle east

Monday

Paul Wood

Goodbye, Lebanon

I’m sorry, Lebanon. We love you but we just can’t take it anymore. We’re breaking up with you. We’ve lived in Lebanon, on and off, for almost a decade. Our retreat began over the summer when we decided we couldn’t risk going to the beach with our daughter, who’s almost two. Every year, the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research puts out a report that says that the seawater around many of Lebanon’s beaches is full of fecal bacteria. Raw sewage is discharged into the sea: you are literally swimming in shit. From some beaches, you can see the pipe and a murky flow of streptococci. We tried. We really did. We visited a private beach club that was supposed to have some of the cleanest water in the country.

lebanon

Tuesday

Monica Crowley

Saigon and Kabul: what would Nixon say?

Having worked with former president Richard Nixon during the last years of his life, I’m often asked what his view would be about some present-day issue. Given the rampant comparisons between the calamitous fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban following the Biden administration’s precipitous withdrawal and the disastrous fall of Saigon in 1975, Nixon’s perspective would have been invaluable. He believed, like all strong, effective US presidents, that American strength means greater stability and peace and American weakness begets instability and conflict. With the end of the cold war and the bipolar international system, the US became the global hegemon, nearly solely responsible for a stable global order.

NIxon

Monday

Roger Kimball

Joe Biden’s short walk in the Hindu Kush

'There is no light in the bazaar. The Americans brought the light when they came to build the great dam . . . but when they left the took the machine with them and now there is no more light.’ — Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush There really isn’t much that is amusing about Afghanistan. There never has been. But Eric Newby wrote a most amusing book about his trek through the Hindu Kush in the late 1950s. These days, when the Americans decamp from Afghanistan they leave behind tons — literally tons — of lights, not to mention munitions of various sizes and lethality, roads, buildings, communication devices of all sorts — you name it. A few days ago, we were told that the Afghan government might fall within 90 days to the newly resurgent Taliban.

Biden

Saturday

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

The dark Prince

‘No modern US war would be complete without the involvement of Blackwater founder Erik Prince,’ wrote journalist Jeremy Scahill in his seminal book Dirty Wars. That was back in 2013. Since its founding in 1997, Blackwater, Prince’s private military outfit, has been reincarnated several times under different names. But Prince has stayed the same. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia — Prince, a very 21st-century mercenary, has wreaked havoc in all these places. He comes, he spoils, he leaves a mess that is impossible to clear up. Take Libya.

prince

Friday

Paul Wood

Will coronavirus lead to a US war with Iran?

In a roundabout way, coronavirus may have been responsible for the deaths of two American service personnel and a British soldier in a rocket attack in Iraq on Wednesday. This triggered a prompt US military retaliation — American forces launched strikes at five sites in the early hours of this morning — and the prospect now is of an escalation while the rest of the world is consumed with a global health crisis. What's going on? It was Gen. Qasem Soleimani’s birthday on Wednesday and a Shiite militia — probably Kataib Hezbollah — chose to mark the occasion by firing Katusha rockets at Camp Taji, the US base just north of Baghdad.

war with iran coronavirus

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

All forecasts are off if Iran shuts the Strait of Hormuz

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…late last year, a range of forecasts suggested that the likelihood of recession in the US, with knock-on effects for the rest of the developed world, had significantly diminished. Last summer, many economists were putting the chance of a substantial downturn at 50 percent but by November, Goldman Sachs had marked it down to 24 percent and Morgan Stanley to ‘around 20 percent’. Underlying this shift were strong corporate earnings and consumer spending, plus rising hopes of a settlement of US-China trade tensions. Last month saw a sell-off of safety-first government bonds reflecting the mood, and the FT’s end-of-year forecasts included a confident ‘No’ to ‘Will the US go into recession?

hormuz

Wednesday

Dominic Green

Donald Trump and the unreality of a two-state solution

The AIPAC conference, that annual celebration of the triangular romance between America, Israel and American Jews, concluded last night with the traditional protestations of undying love, democratic compatibility and common values. Meanwhile, AIPAC’s identity crisis deepens, and a redefinition of the goals of the American-Israeli relationship looms. AIPAC is studiously bipartisan, but the maladroit policies of the Bush and Obama administrations and the rightward turn of Israeli politics since the Second Intifada have made Israel a partisan issue in American politics. A recent Pew survey found more polarization than at any point in the last four decades: 79% of Republicans sided with Israel, but only 27% of Democrats.

donald trump foreign policy

Tuesday

Alan Mendoza

Why Bibi ♥ Trump

Not many world leaders can claim to be on friendly personal terms with Donald Trump. There are fewer still who would regard a visit to this particular president’s White House as a crowning achievement, and one which would increase their popularity at home rather than being seen as a moral failing. So the lesson of Benjamin Netanyahu’s triumphant meeting with the US president deserves particular scrutiny for having jumped all these hurdles. Admittedly, it helps to be a right wing Israeli Prime Minister at a time of Republican ascendancy. Netanyahu’s relationship with Barack Obama was famously abrasive. Any successor was bound to be an improvement, even if the strong US-Israel relationship goes far deeper than the Presidential level.