Low oil prices are eating into defense spending in the Gulf region, one of the world’s largest arms markets, with budgets trimmed for the first time in a decade this year and deeper cuts expected in 2016, according to a report published on Thursday. Overall spending fell to …
Read More »Yearly Archives: 2015
Friction and ISIS What happens when Daesh loses momentum on the battlefield?
The militants of the so-called Islamic State dominated headlines through 2013–2015 with their swift seizure of territory and population centers across Syria and Iraq. Their use of basic tenets of maneuver warfare (mobility, mass, concentration) allowed them to overwhelm state-sponsored militias and military forces from Assad’s Syrian regime …
Read More »Barbarism Advances. “The 1930s All Over Again in Europe”
Luciana Bohne In October of 1930, Thomas Mann made “An Appeal to Reason” in The Berliner Tageblatt: “This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and …
Read More »Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Russia All Accuse Turkey of Smuggling Oil
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya Because of the Turkish government’s role in the multi-spectrum US-led war against the Syrian Arab Republic, a war of words has ignited between Ankara and Moscow. Russia, however, is not alone in accusing Turkey of being involved in the theft of Syrian and Iraqi oil. …
Read More »Imperialism and capitalism: Rethinking an intimate relationship
The literature on imperialism suffers from a fundamental confusion about the relationship between capitalism and imperialism. The aim of this paper is to remove this confusion. The paper is organised in three parts. In Part I we state our own position of the capitalism-imperialism relation. In part II …
Read More »The Real Reason the EU Doesn’t Want the South Stream Pipeline
Scarcely heard amid the guns of Ukraine, the South Stream pipeline, which the Russians want to build through southern Europe to circumvent Ukraine, is still gurgling along in the background. The FT tries hard to hide its glee behind a facade of philosophical twaddle centered around the notion …
Read More »Choosing Not to Choose: Obama’s Dithering on Syria
Paul Saunders When President Barack Obama acknowledged in September 2014 that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), he stunned his supporters and detractors alike. Obama was similarly candid nine months later, when he announced in a June …
Read More »The Role of Mass Media in the Fight Against Terrorism
Last week’s conference in Moscow which was held under the slogan of “Journalists from Muslim countries against extremism” has provided an opportunity amongst media anchors how to combat and encounter terrorism and extremism which exploit media for the benefit of their operational efficiency, information gathering, recruitment, fund raising, …
Read More »How Would Turkey End? – Some Scenarios
By Stana Dubajic • After downing of the Russian SU-24 fighter-jet over Syrian airspace for an alleged ‘Turkish airspace violation’, the US probably expected Russia to retaliate militarily, which would then ‘justify’ deeper military involvement of US-UK-NATO alliance in the Syrian-Iraqi battlefield. Since Russia and Iran would not let …
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