14 November 2023 The Frog, The Scorpion and Hamas By Gwynne Dyer Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. Or rather, don’t, because it’s relevant to the current situation, and we have to bring the people who don’t know the story up to speed first. It’s about a frog, doing whatever it is that …
1 November 2023 Ukraine: The Big Push Fails By Gwynne Dyer On 10 September, the great breakthrough was underway. “The Ukrainians went forward again,” said breathless reports from the front lines. “The Ukrainian Armed Forces are moving west of Novoprokopovka, east of Verbovo and between Novoprokopovka and Verbovo, expanding the breakthrough zone.” Fifty days later, …
2 February 2022 African Coups By Gwynne Dyer Military coups are back in fashion in Africa. There have been over 200 attempted coups in the continent since 1960, about half of them successful, but in the past two decades they had dropped to only two a year. Last year saw six, however, and there have …
15 August 2020 The ‘two-state solution’ is still dead. The deal to open diplomatic ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, announced by Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Thursday, opens no new vistas for a ‘just peace’ between the Israelis and the Arabs. It just repackages the existing reality. There wasn’t …
The ‘mad dog of the Middle East’, as Ronald Reagan once called Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, is on the brink of achieving his life’s ambition: becoming the dictator of Libya. He’s a rather old mad dog by now (75), but after a two-month siege his troops are starting to break through the defences of the …
“Idlib Province is the largest al-Qaeda safe haven since 9/11,” said Brett McGurk, Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS, so you wouldn’t think that the United States would object to the Syrian government reconquering it. Especially since US forces in Syria have no way of reaching Idlib, in the country’s northwestern …
“The people behind what is taking place think they will be able to harm the government,” said Iran’s First Vice-President, Eshaq Jahangiri. “But when social movements and protests start in the street, those who have ignited them are not always able to control them.” And the question is: which people did Jahangiri actually mean, and …
If the US Congress had not imposed a two-term limit on the presidency in 1947 after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s record four electoral victories, President Barack Obama would be a safe bet for a third term next November. He inherited the worst recession since the Great Depression, and now the United States has the healthiest economy …
On Friday, Saudi Arabia’s Sunni Muslim rulers beheaded their country’s leading Shia Muslim cleric, Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, on charges of seeking “foreign meddling” in the kingdom. On Saturday, an angry crowd of Iranians – all Shia Muslims, of course – attacked the Saudi Arabian embassy in Tehran. And Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, …
If historical ingratitude were a crime, most of the people writing year-end pieces this month would be in jail. This year was not like 1919, when 3 percent of the world’s population died of influenza, or 1943, when the Second World War was killing a million people each month, or 1983, when we came very …