The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Syria: will it prove to be the empire's final quagmire? The West's long descent from the 1993 Wolfowitz Doctrine, one Pyrrhic victory after another. Alex Krainer On Sunday morning we woke up to the most surreal news: the regime of  Bashar al-Assad  in Syria is no more. From the day the new-and-improved Jabhat al-Nusra, now renamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), launched their attack on Syria (Wednesday, 27 November at 7:50 AM) to Sunday, 8 December 2024, only 11 days' time. In those 11 days, Damascus fell and president Assad fled to Russia. The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) offered next to no resistance and HTS drove straight through Syria almost unopposed. West’s moderate head choppers in action All of a sudden and seemingly out of nowhere, the already strategically defeated Western empire suddenly scored a brilliant victory and everything changed. The media and social networks are chock-full of stories about how this happened and explanations of why it happened this way. Suppos...

  The Long War to Reaffirm Western and Israeli Primacy Undergoes a Shape-Shift Alastair Crooke The Middle East is ‘conservative’ no more. Rather, a very different ‘Awakening’ is gestating. The long war to reaffirm western and Israeli primacy is undergoing a shape-shift. On one front, the calculus in respect to Russia and the Ukraine war has shifted. And in the Middle East, the locus and shape of the war is shifting in a distinct way. Georges Kennan’s famed Soviet doctrine has long formed the baseline to U.S. policy, firstly directed toward the Soviet Union, and latterly, towards Russia. Kennan’s thesis from 1946 was that the United States needed to work patiently and resolutely to thwart the Soviet threat, and to enhance and aggravate the internal fissures in the Soviet system, until its contradictions triggered the collapse from within. More recently, the  Atlantic Council  has drawn on the Kennan doctrine to  suggest  that his broad outline should serve as the...

  Decision in November 2024 Illusion of Choice, Delusion of Triumph Back in the day, a liberal Jewish cartoonist named Herbert Block (pen name “Herblock”) gave every new president a free shave. In the case of Richard Nixon, whom he usually portrayed with a very heavy late-in-the-day beard even at dawn, this was seen at the time as giving him – editorially speaking – a fresh start. These days, I expect Herblock would at least give Donald Trump a free haircut, no matter how much he disliked his politics. For my part, I consider presidential elections to be orchestrated and I believe voting matter little in the grand scheme of things. Nonetheless, Trump deserves a measure of respect for transcending what he and his family and friends endured in recent years. I’d be willing to clean Herblock’s clippers and sweep up after he was done. Nor will I soon forget Melania Trump’s smile – I’ll bet she has a list or three. So What Did Happen? Many people are using terms like “landside,” “steamro...