So the anthem now goes something like this: C'mon, baby don't you wanna go/back to that same old place/sweet home ring of steel Chicago. Robert Johnson must be spitting fire in his bluesy grave because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), for its 25th summit, is occupying Chicago like it was Kabul - with Americans... Read More

(Satire alert) DAMASCUS - World powers are racing against time to plunge Syria into all-out civil war, United Nations leader Ban Ki-moon advised, as a watchdog reported "thousands" of killings of civilians on YouTube by the Syrian regime. Speaking after a key United Nations Security Council meeting on Syria, officials described in detail the "brutality"... Read More

Every grain of sand in the Syrian desert now knows there won't be a "responsibility to protect"-enabled North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “humanitarian” intervention to provoke regime change in Damascus. A protracted war like in Libya is not feasible - even though those faultless democratic practitioners, the House of Saud, have offered to pay for... Read More

Target Syria - the strategic prize that outstrips Libya. The stage is set. The stakes couldn't be higher. Libya 2.0 equals Syria? It's more like Libya 2.0 remix. With the same R2P (''responsibility to protect'') rationale - starring civilians bombed into ''democracy''. But with no UN Security Council resolution (Russia and China will veto it).... Read More

They are fighting over the carcass as vultures. The French Ministry of Defense said they got him with a Rafale fighter jet firing over his convoy. The Pentagon said they got him with a Predator firing a Hellfire missile. After a wounded Colonel Muammar Gaddafi sought refuge in a filthy drain underneath a highway -... Read More

Enough about The Big G's downfall. Now comes the real nitty-gritty; Afghanistan 2.0, Iraq 2.0, or a mix of both. The "NATO rebels" have always made sure they don't want foreign occupation. But the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - which made the victory possible - can't control Libya without boots on the ground. So multiple... Read More

The Big Gaddafi has barely left the building - the Bab-al-Aziziyah compound - and the Western vultures are already circling overhead; the scramble is on to seize the "big prize" - Libya's oil and gas wealth. [1] Libya is as much a pawn in a serious ideological, geopolitical, geo-economic and geostrategic chessboard as a pedestrian... Read More

It's late night in Tripoli and The Big Gaddafi is sipping a White Russian, smoking some prime Maghreb produce and tuning in to a bank of plasma TVs in his tent at the Bab al-Aziziyah fortress. No luscious Ukrainian nurse could possibly appease his restless soul. He stares in disbelief at the narrative unrolling in... Read More

Way beyond the impenetrable fog of war, the ongoing tragedy in Libya is morphing into a war of acronyms that graphically depicts the tortuous "birth pangs" of a possibly new world order. On one side there's NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and AL (the Arab League; on the other side, the African Union (AU)... Read More

Forget about the Hollywood Transformer franchise; as facts on the ground go, the ultimate transformer in real life is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO has just admitted it was "probably" responsible for the humanitarian liberation of nine Libyan civilians, plus 18 injured, via an early morning strike against an apartment building in a... Read More

They are a shish kebab of hereditary monarchies, emirates and outright theocracies. Most sit on oceans of oil (45% of the world's reserves). They are addicted to the West's glitter and glamour - from London to Monte Carlo, from the delicacies of Paris to the weaponized delicacies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO. They... Read More

How to turn a ''kinetic military action'' - which is not a war - into some sort of endgame, by bending a United Nations resolution that was allegedly passed to minimize a humanitarian threat? You write a lame op-ed. Just ask The Three Amigos - US President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and... Read More

If former Pentagon supremo Donald "known unknown" Rumsfeld were still in business, he'd be grumbling that Libya presents no bombable targets - as in Afghanistan in 2001. As far as United States quagmires go, Libya is bigger than Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined. But any possible "targets" concentrate in a few cities along the Mediterranean... Read More

Odyssey Dawn slogs on - a tawdry "kinetic military action" (as per the White House) worthy of the Pentagon's resident Homer. The stalemate on the ground could go on for weeks, if not months. This is more like The Iliad remixed - remember, the Trojan War slogged on for 10 years without a decisive result.... Read More

The current stalemate in Libya could last weeks, if not months. In that case, balkanization looms. Think of eastern Libya with Benghazi as capital, oil-rich and with a United States-installed puppet regime (a Libyan Hamid Karzai, like the Afghan president). It would be like a kind of northern Africa Saudi Arabia (the House of Saud... Read More

See also UN's 'coalition of the opposed' grows The minute Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told the Anatolia news agency, "The coalition that was formed following the Paris meeting will abandon the mission and hand it over entirely to a single command system under NATO", the issue was settled. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is... Read More

Without cutting through the fog of war it's impossible to understand what's really going on in Libya. Odyssey Dawn is only happening because the 22-member Arab League voted to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. The Arab League - routinely dismissed in Western capitals as irrelevant before this decision - is little else than an... Read More

War is peace. Protesters are now off-camera, missile diplomacy is on camera. Packaged in moral uprightness, Tomahawks, Typhoons, Tornados, Rafales, Mirages, B-2s and F-18s - not to mention sexy European Storm Shadow cruise missiles and possible guest star the F-22 Raptor radar-evading stealth jet - now speak the language of democracy. These "military assets", displaying... Read More

It would be really uplifting to imagine United Nations Security Council resolution 1973 [1] on Thursday was voted just to support the beleaguered anti-Muammar Gaddafi movement with a no-fly zone, logistics, food, humanitarian aid and weapons. That would be the proof that the "international community" really "stands with the Libyan people in their quest for... Read More

The European Union (EU), this Monday in Oslo, received the Nobel Peace Prize for advancing peace, reconciliation, democracy and human rights. How exciting. Look at the cast selected to receive the award; the spectacularly useless Herman van Rompuy (president of the European Council); the spectacularly mediocre Jose Manuel Barroso (president of the European Commission); and... Read More

As clinically on target as a pat-down in a major United States airport, the Pentagon got a fabulous box of chocolates - and then some - from its 27 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies at last weekend's Lisbon summit. The chocolates come in a full spectrum of flavors. One: NATO's new "Strategic Concept", complete... Read More

Be afraid. Be very afraid. At the Lisbon summit this Friday and Saturday, a gargantuan, innocuously sounding, self-described "military alliance of democratic states in Europe and North America" that happens to be a Cold War relic sits in its own nuclear-adorned couch to speculate what it is actually all about. In this otherwise Freudian scenario,... Read More

Anyone aware enough to think that Washington's goal is not to "win" the unwinnable AfPak quagmire but to keep playing its bloody infinite war game forever is now eligible for a personal stimulus package (in gold). Let's review the recent evidence. All of a sudden, the White House, the Pentagon and the United States House... Read More

The people of Strasbourg have voted in their apartment balconies for the French-German co-production of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 60th birthday this Saturday. Thousands of "No to NATO" banners, alongside "Peace" banners, sprung up all around town until forcibly removed by French police. Prime "liberal democracy" repression tactics were inevitably on show - just... Read More

BRUSSELS - The huge compound housing SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers in Europe) lies in the outskirts of the Belgian city of Mons, near Brussels, but it might as well be in an Ohio suburb. It is literally surrounded by gas stations, burger joints, fitness clubs, used car lots, everything in English, not French... Read More