Category: Middle East

The SINAI Shootdown

The downing of the Russian plane in mid-November over the Sinai Peninsula was a targeted hit. It was aimed at two countries – Russia and Egypt. We can understand Russia; but why Egypt?  To better understand the dynamics of Egypt, let’s do a brief background on the country. Egypt Egypt has always given the world […]

The Mosul-Haifa Pipeline

As a follow up to the previous issue, we now discuss the story of the Mosul to Haifa pipeline, and this will bring us to the real reason for Israel’s excitement in northern Iraq.  We have taken passages from an article by the late Joe Vialls, called “Israel’s Blitzkrieg on Middle East Oil “. This […]

The Crisis of ISIS

Over the past 18 months the world has been gripped by the phenomenon of ISIS. Who and what is ISIS. Let’s go back to the beginning.   Since the early 1950’s, when the CIA station chief in Munich became aware of the effective use of radical Jihadist Muslims from the Soviet Union, US intelligence has […]

The Arab Spring

The name “Arab Spring” is a term coined in distant offices in Washington, London, and Paris.  The upheavals in the Arab World are not an Arab awakening either; such a term implies that the Arabs have been sleeping while injustice has been surrounding them. In reality the Arab world has been filled with wars and […]

THE GAS WARS Part 3 (of a 3 part series)

We went with Gazprom to the west into Europe, to the east into China, to the south into Africa. Now we travel to the Eastern Mediterranean. And so, let’s start with Syria. Syria Syria has been on the Pentagon’s drawing board for years, largely because of its important geo-strategic emplacement in the Middle East.  The […]

THE GAS WARS Part 2 (of a 3 part series)

Moscow Goes East  At the end of 2009, precisely as planned and to the surprise of Washington, Russia opened the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) oil pipeline, a 4-year construction project costing some $14 billion.  The pipeline now allows Russia to export oil directly from its East Siberia fields to China as well as Korea and […]

THE GAS WARS Part 1 (of a 3 part series)

Contrary to widely held beliefs in the west, the Cold War did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, or the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, at least not for Washington. Seeing the opportunity to expand the reach of American military and political power, the Pentagon began a […]

THE SCO AND 9-11: Part 2 (of a 2 Part Series)

(The following is extracted from the original report prepared by the author in August 2001. A few more notes have been added to the original report, in September 2001) Afghanistan The landlocked state of Afghanistan sits at the crossroads of Central Asia, the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East. It is geo-strategically and economically important […]

THE SCO and 9-11: Part 1 (of a 2 Part Series)

Part 1(extracted from the original report prepared by the author in August 2001) In order to understand why the attacks of September 11(2001), in New York, took place, we will have to do some background. And it all has to do with the quest for American dominance of Eurasia. The Fight for Control of Eurasia […]

Why America Invaded Iraq in 2003

Iraq had suffered a heavy defeat in March 1991, when a combined force of 34 countries headed by the US and Britain defeated Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein. A year earlier Iraq had invaded Kuwait for financial reasons. The US pushed Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, but did not invade Iraq. Iraq was economically broken […]

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