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The Middle East: The Boiling Cauldron, A New Flash Point |
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Saturday, 27 October 2007 |
In my July 17, 2007 posting to this blog titled “The Middle East: A Boiling Cauldron”, I tried to elucidate on the seriousness and volatility of the situation in this extremely vital part of the world which is also very unstable and explosive concentrating on three countries in the region that are seething with conflict violence and polarization: Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. The situation in the holy Land is still highly inflamed threatening the emergence of two mini Palestinian states, one faction of them Fattah are talking to the Americans and the Israelis before the meeting next month in Annapolis, which is rejected by Hamas. The Lebanese are still haggling over the election of a new president who should be acceptable to all factions in that badly torn country, an exercise which should have been completed by the 23rd of this month but has been postponed to November 12. The failure to elect a head of state with such credentials threatens the emergence of two competing presidents and two governments with very serious and nightmarish consequences. The third member of this triad Iraq is still in a very bad shape every thing there is worse than it was few weeks ago, Iraq is disintegrating and decaying the people are impoverished and insecure and are fleeing the land in the tens of thousands every month, but as if all that was not enough the border area between turkey and Iraq which has been the site of a very long conflict between the Turks and the PKK suddenly exploded creating another very serious flash point in a highly explosive cauldron.
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Sunday, 14 October 2007 |
Interview of Dr. Hanoudi on NPR in April of 2007: NajibHanoudi-NPR.mp3
PowerPoint file of rare pictures from Iraq from the 19th and 20th centrury: Iraq1888_1960.pps
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The Hanoudiletter: The Story of My Friends, the Tomas |
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Saturday, 22 September 2007 |
Updated on September 25, 2007
This blog has been dominated since its inception by postings about the current situation in Iraq. In the beginning I said that I would be talking about certain subjects which are of a special interest to me like history, ethno-religious conflicts and geopolitics, but with the incredible changes which were taking place in Iraq after the 2003 war I started to do a lot of writing on the Iraqi situation which was already very serious and deteriorating rapidly. The current situation at home has dominated this work because of its increasing complexity and the dangers it is posing to its people especially those who are still there and have not joined the millions who are living in exile. The Iraqi mess has developed into an extremely multifaceted and a terrible nightmare, which is defying all attempts at explaining or analyzing which is deterring me from writing about. But as I have very often pontificated on this website the Iraqi mess has a certain dynamics of its own which constantly attracts you to it, last month's events in Iraq, the almost total collapse of the political system, the incredible deterioration of the security situation and the story of the Blackwater security agency have attracted me to it again. I am writing today about the astonishing story of my friends the Toma family.
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Saddam's WMDs: The 20th Anniversary of the Halabja Gassing |
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Wednesday, 22 August 2007 |
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War is madness. War is one of civilized man's most obtuse inventions. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t know war or violence, but Homo sapiens invented war and fell in love with it and have ever since been constantly improving its technologies and its methods. The technologies modern man discovered varied over the many centuries, man was at war with his fellow sapiens and one the most bizarre discoveries was weapons of mass destruction and especially the chemical weapons. Chemical weapons were used many centuries ago by primitive tribes here and there when they were able to improve the deadly efficiency of their arrows by adding to the tips of their arrows some plant derivatives they were known to be poisonous which proved to be very useful during their conflicts with other tribes! The first application of chemistry in warfare in modern times was the use of Chlorine gas during the so called trench wars between the Germans and the allies during the First World War in the second battle of Ypres in 1915, later on phosgene and mustard gas were used. More recently the obvious and strongest advocate of weapons of mass destruction was Saddam Hussein.
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