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it’s not just Kremlin-produced disinformation that Americans may have stumbled upon recently. Browsing Facebook and Twitter — and even just perusing the magazine rack at their local Walmart — they may have also been exposed to propaganda supporting the ambitious goals of two oil-rich Arab Gulf countries

when Saudi Arabia and the UAE launched a boycott and blockade of the tiny peninsula state of Qatar last year, organizations with ties to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi tried something new: They worked to sway American public opinion through online and social media campaigns, bringing a complicated, distant conflict among three Washington allies to US shores

As they took steps against Doha, Saudi Arabia and the UAE also initiated propaganda efforts in the US aimed at weakening Washington’s alliance with Qatar — which hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East — while also enhancing their own images.

when pressed, the head of the officers’ delegation became red-faced with anger. Apparently, laying the groundwork for more open and just politics did not include human rights organizations, good-governance groups, environmentalists, private associations that provide aid to people in need, or other NGOs.

in Egypt, employees of NGOs have become virtual enemies of the state. In keeping with its reputation as the lone Arab Spring “success story,” Tunisia has created a more welcoming environment for these groups, but even there, the ability of NGOs to carry out their work can be constrained given that a state of emergency and other laws place restrictions on the right to assemble

the relentless pressure Middle Eastern governments have long applied to NGOs. Leaders in the region do not do well with ideas like “self-organizing,” “relatively autonomous from the state,” and the creation of associations and “solidarities” — and it is hard, without justifying repression, not to see why. Civil society groups have the potential to help people with common interests overcome the considerable obstacles to collective action that many Middle Eastern governments have put in place and, in the process, give greater voice to people’s grievances.

there were numerous occasions when Bush and his advisers made statements that intelligence agencies knew to be false, both about WMDs and about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent links to al-Qaeda.

The failure of Iraq was not merely a case of well-meaning but incompetent policymakers rushing into what they should’ve known would be a disaster. It’s the story of those policymakers repeatedly misleading the public about why, exactly, the war started.

These programs are “specifically designed for us to work with our host nation partners to develop small — anywhere between 80 and 120 personnel — counterterrorism forces that we’re partnered with,” said Bolduc. “They are specially selected partner-nation forces that go through extensive training, with the same equipment we have, to specifically go after counterterrorism targets, especially high-value targets.”

Between 2013 and 2017, U.S. special operations forces saw combat in at least 13 African countries

Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Somalia, South Sudan and Tunisia

A federal court has held Syria’s government liable for the targeting and killing of an American journalist as she reported on the shelling of a rebellious area of Homs in 2012. The decision could help ease the way for war-crimes prosecutions arising from the Syria conflict.

awarded $302.5 million to relatives of the journalist, Marie Colvin. Of that sum, $300 million is punitive damages for what Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in her ruling, called “Syria’s longstanding policy of violence” that aimed “to intimidate journalists” and “suppress dissent.”

The large size of the award sends a message, he said, that “the rule of law is still a force to be reckoned with,” even amid a global trend toward authoritarianism and the killing of journalists like Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian slain in his country’s consulate in Istanbul.

Over the past 40 years, the regime’s entrenched corruption, cronyism, and mismanagement of environmental and natural resources have brought Iran to the edge of disaster. In 2013, the former head of Iran’s environmental protection agency reported that 85 percent of the country’s groundwater was gone, while the population had doubled in the last 40 years. According to Issa Kalantari, a former agriculture minister and current head of the environmental protection agency, millions of Iranians will be forced to migrate to more developed countries, especially in Europe, if the water crisis is not resolved in 20 to 30 years.

the story of Iran’s water crisis began before the revolution when Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi nationalized Iran’s water resources. For more than 3,000 years, Iranians avoided overexploiting aquifers by relying on indigenous pieces of infrastructure called qanats—slightly inclining underground canals for transferring water within arid and semiarid lands without exposing water to the sun. But the shah introduced to Iran the use of deep well-drilling technology and powerful motor pumps that began depleting the country’s aquifers.

the Islamic Republic began to build hundreds of dams, most completely unnecessary, and new networks of water transfer pipelines and channels. The revolutionary government’s hope was that these measures would allow it to collect and supply enough water for agricultural and industrial projects. The dam building also benefited construction companies connected to the regime, especially those affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But the new dams blocked major rivers from reaching many parts of the country and prevented the replenishment of aquifers. As a result, farmers started drilling deeper wells to reach the natural water tables that were gradually sinking.

Syrian pro-government forces have entered the Kurdish-held border enclave of Afrin, reports say, raising the risk of clashes with Turkey.It comes a day after Syria's state news agency said "Popular Forces" would be sent there to counter "the Turkish regime's attack".

Turkey has vowed to clear Afrin of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which it considers a terrorist group.Turkey sees the militia as being an extension of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is banned in Turkey and has fought for Kurdish autonomy there since 1984. The YPG denies any direct military or political links with the PKK.

It will seem counterintuitive to many that someone would trade “senior official” status for a job in a “think tank” to exert more influence. But I had concluded in the late summer of 2012 that President Barack Obama’s words of a year earlier about Assad stepping aside were empty, and that my efforts in government to bring dead words to life were futile.  Instead of implementing what had sounded like the commander-in-chief’s directive, the State Department was saddled in August 2012 by the White House with a make-work, labor-intensive project cataloguing the countless things that would have to be in place for a post-Assad Syria to function. But how to get to post-Assad? The White House had shut down the sole interagency group examining options for achieving that end.

My job since April 2009, as a deputy to Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell, was to build a foundation for Syrian-Israeli and eventually Israeli-Lebanese peace. Progress on the former seemed to be happening. Yet by using deadly force on his own citizens, Assad ended, perhaps forever, a process that might have recovered for Syria the territory lost by his Minister of Defense father in 1967.  When the full story of Syria’s betrayal by a family and its entourage is written, the decision of Assad to sink a potentially promising peace mediation will merit a chapter.

President Obama would caricature external alternatives by creating and debating straw men: invented idiots calling for the invasion and occupation of Syria.  He would deal with internal dissent by taking officials through multi-step, worst-case, hypothetical scenarios of what might happen in the wake of any American attempt, no matter how modest, to complicate regime mass murder. The ‘logical’ result would inevitably involve something between World War III and an open-ended, treasury-draining American commitment.  The result of these exercises in self-disarmament would be Vladimir Putin and his ilk concluding that American power was, as a practical matter, equal to Palau’s; Ukraine could be dismembered, NATO allies threatened, and the United States itself harassed with impunity. He did not mean to do it, but Barack Obama’s performance in Syria produced global destabilization.

In the mid-1960’s William Wesley Peters – son-in-law of Frank Lloyd Wright, his protégé, first apprentice, and chief architect of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation – responded to a unique architectural calling. Shams Pahlavi, the older sister of the last Shah of Iran (self-anointed King-of-Kings Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), needed a palace to call her own. The end result is simply magnificent – not only one of Iran’s most outstanding homes, Shams Palace is also an important architectural example for the world at large.However, in the little-known Iranian city called Karaj (population two million, zero tourists), Frank Lloyd Wright’s figurative fingerprints are disappearing fast. Unfortunately, after recently touring through the abandoned and severely decaying mid-century wonder, I have sadly concluded <leans against the fireplace, gazes out the window, removes smoking pipe from mouth> that Sham’s Palace may be experiencing its final days…

For centuries in Iran, there’s been an unbreakable relationship between gardens and buildings. Interwoven with each other, the outdoors and indoors became united in Iran long ago. Visitors to historical Iranian homes will recall the main features of typical estate architecture – traditionally, bedrooms and family rooms open directly onto internal courtyards. Typically, the rectangular courtyards feature manicured gardens, ponds, and open-spaces to work and socialise within the privacy of an extended family unit.Inspired by this traditional design, Peters decided to create a large, circular, internal garden space, and surround this contemporised courtyard area with various dwelling-rooms. Filled with exotic plantings and ponds, the garden is consolidated with the rooms by an elegant, translucent, domed roof.

Once inside, through a relentless harmony of circles and spirals, the interior continually reveals itself as a consequent extension of the outdoors. Floors gently ramp, straight lines are minimised, the sky is everywhere. Shams Palace sits on the boundaries of mid-century architecture – organic, playful, and unequivocally hyper-modern.

Egypt's parliament has passed a law allowing the government to restrict the cultivation of crops that require a large amount of water, amid fears that a massive Ethiopian dam being built upstream could cut into the country's share of the Nile. The law passed late Sunday would allow the government to ban the cultivation of rice, bananas and other crops in some areas, with violators facing prison time and a fine of up to $3,000. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi would need to approve the law.

El-Sissi says the country is building desalinization plants on the Red Sea to reduce its dependence on the river as Ethiopia nears completion of the dam.

Thousands of Yemenis have taken to the streets of the capital, Sanaa, to protest after an air strike killed more than 140 people at a wake on Saturday.Demonstrators gathered outside the UN headquarters demanding an international investigation into the strike, blamed on the Saudi-led coalition.

Powerful former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has allied himself with the Houthi rebels that control Sanaa, has called for people to attack soldiers on the Saudi border in revenge.

More than 500 people were wounded in Saturday's bombing, which targeted the wake of the father of Houthi-appointed Interior Minister Gawal al-Rawishan.Many Houthi officials were in attendance and Mr Rawishan was seriously wounded in the strike

Our small delegation is made up of members of Knesset Mossi Raz and Michal Rozin of Meretz, two of their spokespeople, refugee rights attorney Asaf Weitzen, and myself.

Our plan is to trace the path of the asylum seekers whom Israel plans to deport — and those it has already pushed out — and try to learn any information we can about the secret agreements reportedly reached between Israel and both Rwanda and Uganda. The Rwandan and Ugandan governments deny that any such deals even exist

During our time in Kampala, I spoke with eight refugees who were forced out of Israel. Their stories are nearly identical: when they arrived at the airport in Uganda they were greeted by an unidentified official who confiscated the travel documents they received in Israel and then sent them to a hotel for two or three days. There, they were instructed to fill out asylum applications, but explicitly told not to write that they came from Israel. After several days, they were instructed to call someone to pick them up from the hotel, or to find another way out themselves. Without any documents, from then on, they were on their own — foreigners in a strange country, without any legal status or safety net.

In the latest expansion of America’s secret wars, about a dozen Army commandos have been on Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen since late last year, according to an exclusive report by The Times. The commandos are helping to locate and destroy missiles and launch sites used by indigenous Houthi rebels in Yemen to attack Saudi cities.This involvement puts the lie to Pentagon statements that American military aid to the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen is limited to aircraft refueling, logistics and intelligence, and is not related to combat.When senators at a hearing in March demanded to know whether American troops were at risk of entering hostilities with the Houthis, Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the Central Command, assured them, “We’re not parties to this conflict.”

In at least 14 countries, American troops are fighting extremist groups that are professed enemies of the United States or are connected, sometimes quite tenuously, to such militants. The Houthis pose no such threat to the United States. But they are backed by Iran, so the commandos’ deployment increases the risk that the United States could come into direct conflict with that country, a target of increasing ire from the administration, the Saudis and Israelis.

checks and balances have eroded since Sept. 11, 2001, as ordinary Americans became indifferent to the country’s endless wars against terrorists and Congress largely abdicated its constitutional role to share responsibility with the president for sending troops into battle

Baalbek’s 300 years of Roman rule overshadow its 10,000 years of continuous settlement, its prehistoric origins and its role as the wellspring of the valley’s two major water sources – an epicentre of life and fertility.  Its name is formed from two words: Baal, the Semitic lord of the gods and precursor to Zeus and Jupiter; and nebek, the Aramaeic word for sources. The Romans knew it by its Greek name, Heliopolis, meaning "city of the sun".

“Baalbek goes back to the beginning of when man settles and there are not that many that have continuously been settled and had a living history,” says Mahlouji, an independent advisor to the British Museum and London-based curator. “It should not be reduced to the folly of a moment in history when those massive Roman temples were built, and to then embed the story of those epic and awe-inspiring stone structures.” 

These foundation stones, particularly those of the Trilithon, are one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. It’s unknown how these heavy blocks - more than 10 times the weight of the individual blocks which make up the Great Pyramid at Giza - were lifted into place. The uphill slant of the mound rules out carts, levers and pulleys.

Qatar's leading news outlets recently reported that local agricultural production has jumped by 400% since a political and economic blockade was imposed on the emirate by its Arab neighbors in 2017. And within a few years, 40% to 50% of fresh products could be produced locally,

the blockade caused Qatar to realize its vulnerability when it comes to the food supply

 recently ranked as the most water-stressed country in the world. It is also one of the few countries with no permanent rivers as rainfall is extremely unpredictable and highly erratic

The Middle East and North Africa have always been used to more than their fair share of extreme weather and conditions. But it has been made much worse by the twin threats of climate change and man-made intervention, which are hitting the region with increased frequency and ferocity.

"In the Middle East there has been a significant increase in the frequency and the intensity of sand and dust storms in the past 15 years or so."

The lavishly titled Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), under construction on the Blue Nile since 2011, will be the largest in Africa when it is completed. But in Cairo it is being watched anxiously: a rapid increase in demand due to population growth, severe mismanagement of resources and a lack of investment in water infrastructure have made Egypt one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, relying on the Nile for 90 percent of its fresh water.

Nuclear proliferation was just one of the Carter administration’s headaches in late 1979. The president was dealing with a slew of foreign-policy dilemmas, including the build-up to what would become the Iran hostage crisis. Carter was also preparing for a reelection campaign in which he had hoped to showcase his foreign-policy successes, from brokering Israeli-Egyptian peace to successful arms control talks with Moscow. The possibility that Israel or South Africa, which had deep clandestine defense ties at the time, had tested a nuclear weapon threatened to tarnish that legacy. And the fact that South Africa’s own nuclear weapons program, which the Carter administration was seeking to stop, was not yet sufficiently advanced to test such a weapon left just one prime suspect: Israel. Leading figures within the administration were therefore keen to bury the story and put forward alternative explanations. Those alternative explanations were widely dismissed by many members of the scientific and intelligence community at the time; four decades years later, they look even more questionable.

Until recently, there was little practical knowledge about what it meant for an academic to analyze the military activities of the Gulf states because there wasn’t much to study, other than some symbolic joint training exercises, sociological inquiry about the composition of the region’s armed forces, and limited Emirati participation in non-combat operations in places like Kosovo. The bulk of scholarship examined the Gulf in the context of petrodollar recycling (the exchange of the Gulf’s surplus oil capital for expensive Western military equipment) or the Gulf as the object of military intervention, but never as its agent.

Academic research is not espionage—but many parties (notably US and European governments) are implicated in the process that has allowed them to be conflated

The history of the United States and European states undermining regional governments—including its only democratically-elected ones—using covert agents posing as scholars, bureaucrats and businessmen is well-documented. Its legacy is clear in the region’s contemporary politics, where authoritarians and reactionary nationalists frequently paint democratic opposition forces as foreign agents and provocateurs. It’s also visible in the political staying power of religious conservatives, who were actively supported by the US and its allies in order to undermine leftist forces that threatened to nationalize oil fields and expropriate Western corporate property.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has rolled the dice with a US$ 374 million bid to acquire storied British soccer club Newcastle United. If approved by Britain’s Premier League that nominally maintains a high bar for the qualification of aspiring club owners, Prince Mohammed would have demonstrated that he has put behind him an image tarnished by Saudi conduct of a five-year long war in Yemen, the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, systematic abuse of human rights and, more recently, the kingdom’s badly-timed oil price war with Russia.

the kind of financial muscle that allows it to acquire trophies that enable it to project itself in a different light and garner soft power rather than financial gain at a time of a pandemic and global economic collapse.

Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, was reported to be talking to banks about a US$10 billion loan to help finance its acquisition of a 70% stake in Saudi Basic Industries Corp (SABIC). The deal would pour money into the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund.

Only time will tell how much of the United States’ transactional unilateralism, contempt for traditional allies, and dalliance with traditional rivals will endure—and how much will vanish with Donald Trump’s presidency. Still, it would be hard to deny that something is afoot. The understandings and balance of power on which the global order had once been predicated—imperfect, unfair, and problematic as they were—are no longer operative. Washington is both eager to retain the benefits of its leadership and unwilling to shoulder the burdens of carrying it. As a consequence, it is guilty of the cardinal sin of any great power: allowing the gap between ends and means to grow. These days, neither friend nor foe knows quite where America stands

Moscow’s policy abroad is opportunistic—seeking to turn crises to its advantage—though today that is perhaps as much strategy as it needs

Exaggerated faith in outside assistance can distort local actors’ calculations, pushing them toward uncompromising positions and encouraging them to court dangers against which they believe they are immune. In Libya, a crisis risks dangerous metastasis as Russia intervenes on behalf of a rebel general marching on the capital, the United States sends muddled messages, Turkey threatens to come to the government’s rescue, and Europe—a stone’s throw away—displays impotence amid internal rifts. In Venezuela, the government’s obstinacy, fueled by faith that Russia and China will cushion its economic downfall, clashes with the opposition’s lack of realism, powered by U.S. suggestions it will oust President Nicolás Maduro.