Opinion and Analysis
For Barack Obama, Syria is best forgotten this election year
The ordeal of Syria has been a rebuttal of what the diplomacy of Barack Obama once promised and stood for. It is largely forgotten now that Syria and Iran were the two regimes in the Greater Middle East that Obama had promised to “engage.”
Do not rule out military action in Syria
Over the past few months analysts and commentators in and outside the US have been busy trying to determine whether the Obama administration will or will not intervene in Syria before the November 2012 US presidential elections.
The Massacres at Houla and al-Qubeir: The Work of Terrorists?
By Radwan Ziadeh on June 19, 2012 The Syrian foreign ministry is right: terrorist groups are behind the massacres that took the lives of women and children in Houla and al-Qubeir. But these terrorists were not members of Al Qaeda, nor did they belong to
Analysis: Hostility and skepticism mar U.N. Syria mission
(Reuters) – The future of a U.N. monitoring mission in Syria hangs in the balance after the observers halted work following
Civil War Designation for Syria Would Trigger Humanitarian Protections
This week a senior U.N. official said the situation in Syria could be characterized as a civil war, adding his voice to that of several foreign ministers and other diplomats.
Regime-backed militia does Syria’s ‘dirty work,’ analysts say
(CNN) — The Shabiha militia fighters working hand in hand with Syria’s military to repress the 15-month-long uprising are President Bashar al-Assad’s “shock troops,” observers say. “The regime uses them for the real dirty work, killing and violent action, especially where it has to go into an urban area and repress resistance,” said Jeff White, […]
Wounded Syria nears threshold of civil war – experts
(Reuters) – Whatever label the world gives it, Syria’s worsening conflict justifies a U.N. warning of imminent civil war following massacres that have heightened the risk of widespread sectarian violence.
Let’s end the empty talk about Syria
In every conflict, there are clarifying moments of horror, episodes that cast into stark relief the reality of the forces at work and the complex obstacles to peace. The massacre of Al Houla, where more than a hundred civilians were murdered with savage intimacy, is such a moment in the Syria crisis – but not […]
For Obama, intervening in Syria would be good policy and good politics
The Obama administration’s approach to Syria is little more than this sort of hand-wringing, which plays to Bashar al-Assad’s regime as tacit permission to continue killing thousands.
Syrian Affairs 