Trump’s Road to Damascus and a Chance for Conversion
Stratfor | 20th June 2018
The last U.S. ambassador to serve in Damascus, Robert Ford, testified to Congress earlier this year that the "U.S. military and civilian costs in Syria over the past four years are at least $12 billion." It is a high price for failure — failure to depose President Bashar al Assad, to break his alliance with Iran, to prevent Salafist jihadism from taking root in Syria for the first time, to maintain the friendship of U.S.-NATO ally Turkey, to save an estimated half-million Syrians from death and to stem the exodus of nearly half the Syrian population from their homes. Most of the dozen or so former officials of the Barack Obama administration to whom I have spoken in Washington over the past three weeks regret what transpired on their watch, but it's too late for them to do anything about it. President Donald Trump's administration inherited the Syria mess when…
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Palmyra
Granta
‘If you ask the stars to choose a place instead of the sky They will say Palmyra.’ – Yaseen al-Farjani The young man betrayed no emotion as he told the story: ‘They asked him to kneel. He refused. He said,…
As Gaza sinks into desperation, a new book makes the case against Israeli brutality
The Intercept
Israel celebrates a double anniversary on May 15 this year, the founding of the state and the formal establishment of the Israeli Defense Forces, the name the state gave to its combined army, navy, and air force. Armed statehood fulfilled…
Lebanon’s Election Ritual Repeats
Stratfor
Despite the topsy-turvy machinations of Lebanon's elections May 6, the country's voters awaited a more decisive verdict two days later from U.S. President Donald Trump. The Lebanese had no say in Trump's election, but his decision to abrogate the 2015…
Charles Glass is a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau with Peter Jennings. He covered the October Arab-Israeli War on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. He also covered civil war in Lebanon, where artillery fire wounded him in 1976. He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1993, he has been a freelance writer in Paris, Tuscany, Venice and London, regularly covering the Middle East, the Balkans, southeast Asia and the Mediterranean region. He has also published books, short stories, essays and articles in the United States and Europe.