Monday, February 29, 2016

Commentaries, Analysis, And Editorials -- February 29, 2016



Emmanuel Karagiannis, Newsweek: Why The War in Syria is Only the Beginning

The Fog of War that Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously mentioned in his breakthrough book On War (1832) is visible in the Middle East. In 2011, when the Arab Spring reached Syria, most western policymakers and analysts underestimated the resilience of President Assad’s regime, mistakenly predicting a quick defeat of his forces. Their assumption was that Assad would suffer the same fate as the former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and become yet another hated dictator overthrown by his people.

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Commentaries, Analysis, And Editorials -- February 29, 2016

How the US and Russia Can Make the Syria Ceasefire Deal Last -- Patrick Smith, Fiscal Times

Erdoğan’s fury at the Constitutional Court and the Ankara beltway -- Murat Yetkin, Hurriyet Daily News

Once I Saw Light in Iran. Now It’s Mostly Shadows. -- Azadeh Moaveni, NYT

China's Welcome Action Against North Korea -- Bloomberg editorial

Can Egypt and Ethiopia share the Nile River? -- Daniel Pipes, Japan Times

The Killing Fields of South Sudan -- Nicholas Kristof, NYT

With 'resignation' announcement, Chechnya's strongman woos Putin -- Fred Weir, CSM

Refugee Crisis Disunity: A De Facto Solution Takes Shape in the Balkans -- Spiegel Online

EU's Tower of Babel may fall while leaders distracted -- Paul Taylor, Reuters

Recognize Kosovo or Pay the Price -- Marc Champion, Bloomberg

The Guardian view on the Irish election: economic pain for no political gain -- Guardian editorial

Big economies are ill-equipped for next emergency -- Peter Thal Larsen, Reuters

Stopping America’s Federal Debt Explosion -- Martin Feldstein, Project Syndicate

Watch Five Years of Oil Drilling Collapse in Seconds -- Tom Randall, Julian Burgess and Blacki Migliozzi, Bloomberg

What’s Wrong (and Right) with the CIA? -- Michael Morell, The Cipher Brief

2 comments:

James said...

Again, a video of a Syrian urban area obviously the scene of fairly heavy military activity, but with no trash. No loose papers, mounds of garbage, no rags, nothing of the sort. I don't pretend to know why only that it's interesting.

Don Bacon said...

Well Syria is a tragedy but Obama had no choice but to pursue it as a just war. From his Nobel speech, I "cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people." And Syria was a definite threat to the American people, in his perverted mind at least so it was necessary to pursue the overthrow of the Syria government in direct violation of the UN Charter and if it resulted in the destruction of Syria, so what. As earlier Americans said about Vietnam destruction: We destroyed it to save it.