Confirmation that Israeli warplanes have carried out a series of air strikes in Syria against consignments of missiles being shipped to Hizbollah in southern Lebanon has highlighted Iran's attempts to reinforce its regional allies in anticipation of military conflict with Israel.
As I revealed last month, recent intelligence reports indicate that Iran has revived its efforts to ship weapons to the radical Hamas movement in Gaza. Following negotiations between members of the Quds force from Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Sudanese government officials and Hamas leaders earlier this year, Iran has chartered a number of Boeing 747 cargo planes to smuggle weapons to Hamas via Sudan.
Under the terms of the agreement, weapons are shipped from Tehran to the Syrian capital Damascus, and from Damascus they are sent to Khartoum. Then they are transported by road from Sudan to Gaza travelling through Egypt and the Sinai Desert.
At the same time it now appears that Iran is also trying to send shipments to weapons to Hizbollah, its proxy militia in southern Lebanon. Hizbollah and Israel fought an inconclusive war in 2006, and with Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, a close ally of Hizbollah, involved in a desperate battle for survival, Iran is anxious to ensure that Hizbollah is fully equipped if the conflict results in renewed hostilities with Israel.
Jonathan Spyer explains how Syrian president Bashar al-Assad may have the upper hand right now in Syria’s two-year-old conflict. “Regime forces have clawed back areas of recent rebel advance,” Spyer writes in the Jerusalem Post. “The government side, evidently under Iranian tutelage, has showed an impressive and unexpected ability to adapt itself to the changing demands of the war.”
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.
How many times in the last century have these concluding lines of C. P. Cavafy’s famous 1898 poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” been quoted? How many modern intellectuals have pondered the subversive implications of that sophisticated question?
Yesterday Syrian president Bashar al-Assad commemorated Syria’s independence day with a television interview where he described the Syrian civil war as a colonial plot. Western powers, said Assad, “never accepted the idea of other nations having their independence. They want those nations to submit to them.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney was asked at today's press briefing, in the context of the Boston bombings, whether U.S. bombings in Afghanistan last month that killed civilians were "terrorism." Carney gave a long answer, but never says "no."
Nick Turse wants us to know that the killing of civilians during the war in Vietnam was “widespread, routine, and directly attributable to U.S. command policies,” that “gang rapes were a . . . common occurrence,” that the running-over of civilians by American vehicle drivers was “commonplace,” and that the American military visited upon South Vietnam an “endless slaughter . . . day after day, month after month . . .
Nick Turse wants us to know that the killing of civilians during the war in Vietnam was “widespread, routine, and directly attributable to U.S. command policies,” that “gang rapes were a . . . common occurrence,” that the running-over of civilians by American vehicle drivers was “commonplace,” and that the American military visited upon South Vietnam an “endless slaughter . . . day after day, month after month . . .
Ten years ago today, the day Baghdad fell to American troops, I wrote that with the downfall of Saddam Hussein, I finally felt free as a journalist to criticize the Iraqi regime under my own byline without fear of reprisal from Saddam’s henchmen in Beirut, where I then lived.
At the end of last month, Dennis Rodman, the eclectic former basketball star, hung out with Kim Jong-un, the leader of the rogue North Korean state. "I love him," Rodman would say of his new friend. "The guy is awesome. He was so honest."
Days after returning, on George Stephanopoulos's ABC show, Rodman delivered a message to President Barack Obama. "One thing he asked me to give Obama something to say and do one thing," said Rodman. "He wants Obama to do one thing, call him."
"He wants a call from President Obama?," the TV host asked.
Writing on Iraq, Victor Davis Hanson says that "we have forgotten, over the ensuing decade, the climate of 2003 and why we invaded in the first place. The war was predicated on six suppositions."
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