After half a century of stasis, there are big new strategic realities in the Middle East, but people are having trouble getting their heads around them. Take the United States, for example. Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State in President Obama’s first administration, is still lamenting her former boss’s failure to send more military help …
24 February 2013 Bahrain Again By Gwynne Dyer “Floggings will continue until morale improves.” As a way of dealing with a discontented crew it was much favoured by 18th-century sea-captains, but the Bahrain government has been an apt pupil. Alas, Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid bin Abdullah al-Khalifa doesn’t quite grasp that this sort of policy …
28 September 2011 Balancing Act in Saudi Arabia By Gwynne Dyer It’s amazing how much sub-text you can pack into a single word. Consider this recent announcement by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia: “Women will be able to run as candidates in the municipal elections and will EVEN have the right to vote.” Well, hurray. …
7 August 2011 The Food Bubble By Gwynne Dyer There are all kinds of bubbles. We had the financial bubble that burst in 2008, causing economic devastation that we are still paying for. There is the Chinese real estate bubble, the biggest in history, which may take the whole world economy down with it when …
6 June 2011 Yemen: After Saleh, What? By Gwynne Dyer President Ali Abdullah al-Saleh, in power in Yemen for the past 33 years and under siege for the past three months, left the country on Saturday night with a large piece of shrapnel lodged just below his heart. He may not come back. Accompanying Saleh …
31 October 2004 Bin Laden Speaks (But Not The Truth) By Gwynne Dyer Osama bin Laden is a master of the art of public relations, and his videotaped message on Friday, 29 October, was a little masterpiece of spin and misdirection. All that nonsense about how he decided to attack the “towers” of New York …
30 May 2004 If Saudi Arabia Falls…. By Gwynne Dyer If you drew up a list of Royal Families That Were Long Overdue To Be Overthrown, the al-Saud family would rank right up there with the Bourbons and the Romanovs. The latest terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, in which twenty-two people, almost all foreigners, were …
18 May 2003 The Scale of the Problem By Gwynne Dyer There’s no point in writing about anything but ‘terrorism’ this week, even if there’s little useful to be said about the recent rash of attacks and alarms beyond the fact that it was hardly a surprise. After all, why would conquering Iraq do anything …
14 May 2003 Terrorism and Patience By Gwynne Dyer The bomb attacks on foreigners’ residential compounds in Riyadh on 12 May were about as surprising as rain in Ireland. There was no surprise in President George W. Bush’s response, either: “The United States will find the killers and they will learn the meaning of American …