Instead of celebrating the rites of the Arab Spring with freedom, democracy and good governance, the region has entered a dark season of war and destruction comparable to the era when the Mongol leader Hulagu besieged and sacked Baghdad.

Gaza’s fate might have been very different if Israel had adopted a positive policy towards the narrow Mediterranean coastal strip after the 1967 occupation.

While Israel stepped up its latest assault on Gaza, Lebanese marked the eighth anniversary of Israel’s 2006 war on their country. This onslaught killed 1,100, wounded thousands, and drove a million from their homes.

Always applied in this region, double standards are particularly egregious these days. The Syrian air force is roundly condemned for striking insurgent held strongholds with barrel bombs while the Western world remains silent as Iraqi helicopters target Mosul, sometimes with bar

The Obama administration is still living in fantasy land as it tries to deal with the insurgencies in Syria and Iraq. The administration’s approach to the crises in these countries is even more fantastic than the line peddled by the Bush administration, which was that Bagh

US Secretary of State John Kerry paid unannounced visits to Baghdad and Erbil this week with the aim of pleading with Iraqi Arab and Kurdish politicians to adopt a national approach to the crisis in the country. In Baghdad, he told dominant Shiites that they had to stop discrimi

It is long past the time that the Western powers and their allies should have reviewed their policy on Syria and decided to come to terms with the Assad regime. Last week, Bashar Assad won a new seven-year term when more than 88 per cent of those participating in the country&rsq

The Egyptian and Syrian presidential elections have a few things in common.

Egyptians have confused and confounded their rulers by failing to turn out as expected in this week’s presidential election, the second since the toppling of president Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled for 30 years, in 2011. Many did not vote because the landslide victory of fo