Uae

Northwest Syria is one of the most wretched places on earth. The Syrian province of Idlib, straddling the border with Turkey, is a haven for the internally displaced and is in all practicality a state within a state. Throughout Syria’s twelve-year-long civil (and proxy) war, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has treated the area as a dumping ground for fighters who refuse to lay down their arms and civilians who want nothing to do with Assad family control. Idlib, representing 4 percent of Syria’s total land, is now host to 25 percent of its entire population. And that was before the earthquake hit. If Syria’s northwest was a gateway to misery before the tremors, it’s now a hellscape. Entire families have been wiped out. Buildings have been reduced to rubble.

David Rothkopf may not be Ron Klain’s favorite DC pundit. That title goes to Jennifer Rubin, the “conservative” Washington Post columnist, whose every word is reportedly read closely by the White House chief of staff and his West Wing minions. But Rothkopf is high on the list of media figures whose slavishly pro-Biden line lands him with more than his fair share of Klain retweets. Earlier this year, Politico characterized Klain and Rothkopf’s relationship as a “Twitter bromance”, with the former retweeting the latter thirty-six times in the first ninety-six days of the Biden presidency.

‘No modern US war would be complete without the involvement of Blackwater founder Erik Prince,’ wrote journalist Jeremy Scahill in his seminal book Dirty Wars. That was back in 2013. Since its founding in 1997, Blackwater, Prince’s private military outfit, has been reincarnated several times under different names. But Prince has stayed the same. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia — Prince, a very 21st-century mercenary, has wreaked havoc in all these places. He comes, he spoils, he leaves a mess that is impossible to clear up. Take Libya.

In these pages last year, I suggested that while the President’s son-in-law may not be a great geo-strategic mind, we should give Jared Kushner a chance to give peace in the Middle East a chance. After all, to paraphrase President Trump’s message to African American voters, what do those suffering Middle Easterners have to lose after close to two decades of failed US military interventions in the area that brought about chaos and bloodshed? Needless to say that I was bombarded with dismissive messages from pals who are proud members of Washington’s ‘foreign policy community’. They thought I was out of my mind and/or trying to land a job in the Trump administration.

Freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar has received a lot of attention after she claimed that the relationship between the United States and Israel was ‘all about the Benjamins’ and that Israel supporters promote ‘allegiance to a foreign country.’ Omar apologized for her remarks, then doubled-down on them a few weeks later. The House proposed a toothless condemnation of anti-Semitism, then settled on a meaningless resolution condemning hate. While many have pointed out the dangerous insinuations behind Omar’s remarks, the nut of her accusation has remained more or less unexamined: do foreign nations and their money influence our policy, and is our foreign policy unduly influenced by money from Israel and Jews?