WORSE THAN A CRIME – A MISTAKE
7 June 2010 ISTANBUL – Turks are still seething with rage over last week’s Israeli attack on a Turkish vessel trying to break the years-long blockade of Gaza. Four of the nine peace activists killed...
View ArticleTHE VIEW FROM ISTANBUL
14 June 2010 ISTANBUL – World leaders seem to spend much of their time these days jetting from one conference to another. Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just arrived here for a...
View ArticleTURKEY’S PROGRESS THREATENED BY FAR LEFT AND FAR RIGHT
June 8, 2013 Western politicians and media have been scolding Turkey’s prime minister Recep Erdogan over this past week’s anti-government demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara. What began as a local...
View ArticleDON’T LET LUNATICS MAKE OUR POLICIES
October 25, 2014 NEW YORK – Things seemed crazy in the US and Canada last week, with a shooting on normally tranquil Parliament Hill in Ottawa and a grisly hatchet attack on two New York City...
View ArticleNO PEOPLE HAVE AN EXCLUSIVE ON SUFFERING
April 25, 2015 It’s good and right that we commemorate the mass killing in the Ottoman Empire during World War I of between 500,000 and 1.5 million Armenians. Many nations now call the slaughter...
View ArticleTURKEY – SUCCESS STORY TURN TO DISASTER
17 October 2015 Turkey, once a pillar of Mideast stability, looks increasingly like a slow-motion truck crash. What makes this crisis so tragic is that not very long ago Turkey was entering a new...
View ArticleANOTHER BIG STEP TO A MAJOR WAR
26 November 2015 Turn to page 214 in the book “War-making for Dummies.” You will find: “plan air operations right on your neighbor’s border, zig in and zag out, make rude gestures at enemy pilots, and...
View ArticleTHE PHONY WAR IN SYRIA
16 April 2016 The great, long-awaited counterattack against ISIS has finally begun. The offensive that spans Syria and western Iraq is targeting the ISIS-held cities of Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq’s second...
View ArticleTURKEY’S GENERALS STRIKE BACK
23 July 2016 September 1961. Geneva, Switzerland. A Turkish classmate of mine named Turgut burst into my room, crying, ‘those bastards just hanged my father!’ The ‘bastards’ in question were Turkey’s...
View ArticlePENTAGON AND CIA AT WAR IN SYRIA
3 Sept 2016 What a mess! In the crazy Syrian war, US-backed and armed groups are fighting other US-backed rebel groups. How can this be? It is so because the Obama White House had stirred up war in...
View ArticleTHE SYRIAN MADHOUSE GETS EVEN CRAZIER
February 2, 2018 Last summer, I was positioned just across the border from the Syrian town of Afrin around which Turkish and Kurdish and, possibly, American forces, are now poised for a head-on clash....
View ArticleTURKEY ON A ROLL
June 30, 2018 Few phobias run deeper in Europe than the fear and hatred of Turks. For at least six hundred years, Europe was locked in innumerable wars with first Seljuk, then Ottoman Turks. My big...
View ArticleTHE KHASHOGGI MURDER – WORSE THAN A CRIME, A MISTAKE
October 20, 2018 After watching the Saudis behead and even reportedly crucify critics and opponents for decades, suddenly Washington’s great and good are outraged by a single murder. The victim was a...
View ArticleTURKEY CALLS TRUMP’S BLUFF
July 13, 2019 Turkey has just called Donald Trump’s bluff by going ahead with the purchase of Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missiles. The outrage in Washington is volcanic. Trump is vowing to rain fire...
View ArticleTURKEY BEATS THE WAR DRUMS
October 12, 2019 More war in wretched Syria. Half the population is now refugees; entire cities lie shattered by bombing; bands of crazed gunmen run rampant; US, French, Israeli and Russian warplanes...
View ArticleTHE MOTHER OF MESSES IN SYRIA
October 19, 2019 What a mess. The imperial cooks in Washington have turned poor Syria into a poison pit of warring factions, with disastrous results for all. Henry Kissinger once quipped that it is...
View ArticleTURKIYE – STRONGMAN OF WEST ASIA
New York – June 3, 2023 Most people think of Turkey – now renamed ‘Turkiye,’ – as an exotic land of spices, little cups of sweet coffee and fierce-looking men with bristling mustaches. They would be...
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