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Michael Jansen
By Michael Jansen - Jul 09,2014
Always applied in this region, double standards are particularly egregious these days. The Syrian air force is roundly condemned for striking insurgent held strongholds with barrel bombs while the Western world remains silent as Iraqi helicopters target Mosul, sometimes with bar
By Michael Jansen - Jul 02,2014
The Obama administration is still living in fantasy land as it tries to deal with the insurgencies in Syria and Iraq. The administration’s approach to the crises in these countries is even more fantastic than the line peddled by the Bush administration, which was that Bagh
By Michael Jansen - Jun 25,2014
US Secretary of State John Kerry paid unannounced visits to Baghdad and Erbil this week with the aim of pleading with Iraqi Arab and Kurdish politicians to adopt a national approach to the crisis in the country. In Baghdad, he told dominant Shiites that they had to stop discrimi
By Michael Jansen - Jun 11,2014
It is long past the time that the Western powers and their allies should have reviewed their policy on Syria and decided to come to terms with the Assad regime. Last week, Bashar Assad won a new seven-year term when more than 88 per cent of those participating in the country&rsq
By Michael Jansen - Jun 04,2014
The Egyptian and Syrian presidential elections have a few things in common.
By Michael Jansen - May 28,2014
Egyptians have confused and confounded their rulers by failing to turn out as expected in this week’s presidential election, the second since the toppling of president Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled for 30 years, in 2011. Many did not vote because the landslide victory of fo
By Michael Jansen - May 21,2014
Ahead of next week’s presidential election in Egypt, former US president Jimmy Carter warned that that country’s transition to democracy “has stalled and stands on the precipice of total reversal”. Carter was wrong because Egypt never managed to launch th
By Michael Jansen - May 14,2014
During a recent visit to the US, I discovered that several relatives I used to consider “genetic Republicans” now back the Democratic Party even though they are not convinced that President Barack Obama is doing a good job. “Genetic Republicans” are peopl
By Michael Jansen - May 07,2014
From 1949 until January 1979, the US recognised Taiwan as the legitimate government of China because the politicians in Washington could not bring themselves to accept that their right-wing Chinese nationalist friends had lost the war with the communists led by Mao Zedong. Taiwa
By Michael Jansen - Apr 30,2014
Having failed to find a “moderate” Syrian insurgent faction, the US seems to have encouraged a young commander to create one to receive a shipment of TOW anti-tank missiles, in the desperate belief that others could break with the radical fundamentalist factions that

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