Confronting Iran in Syria would not have been part of the GCC's plans had the Syrian people not rebelled, and had the regime in Damascus not committed such grave mistakes.
New satellite imagery and eyewitness accounts reveal that the bombardment of the Baba Amr neighborhood in Homs has inflicted widespread destruction and a large number of deaths and severe injuries of civilians.
Of course one has to be careful about taking their statements at face value, but a bit of research backs up their pessimism: There will be no Russian Spring. But why not?
Those who want a pre-emptive war, rather than a strategy of containment, have a very high hurdle of credibility to cross, not the least of it because they've offered little but hysteria.
The United States and Russia are at a potentially fateful crossroads in their relations. Twenty years after the end of the Soviet Union, the relationship features more elements of cold-war conflict than of stable cooperation.
A few days east of Moscow, a young girl called Susanna got on. She had come up from Kazakhstan and was on her way to an arranged marriage somewhere in the far east.
The Gulf-Western alliance has taken the decision to confront Russia on the issue of Syria, and it presumes that the regime will be gone by the end of the year. Indeed, the strategy to implement this has been set in motion.
'You are not sick' is the kind of reassuring message that Robert Kagan is sending to the nation's foreign policy hypochondriacs aka 'declinists' in his new book, contending that America is in tip-top military and economic health and ready to take care of the rest of the world.
The tumult and fabricated anxieties over Iran's oil supply give ample cover to an oil price veering ever higher -- prices explained away by the political tensions at hand. But the question needs to be asked -- what is really driving oil prices?
Much anxiety accompanies the first anniversary of the eruption of the Arab uprisings -- and much wavering between disappointment and hope. There is confusion, uncertainty and vacillation between optimism and pessimism.
The U.N. General Assembly told the Syrian government to stop shooting unarmed protestors and isolated its key supporter, Russia, in adopting a resolution that had at least 137 "yes" votes and only 12 against.
There is renewed hope that Mikhail Khodorkovsky may one day breathe the air of freedom. And yet, the bizarre posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, is a chilling reminder that the Russian winter is by no means over.
The aggressiveness with which the Arab states along the Persian Gulf are pressing for the ouster of Bashar al-Assad from Damascus is really aimed at crippling his Iranian ally.
There were people at Russia's Safer Internet Day conference proposing blocking access to certain types of illegal content. If this sounds familiar, think back just a couple of weeks to our debate around a pair of U.S. bills that would have done just that for sites with alleged pirated content.
The role Russia, and to a lesser extent China, is currently playing in the Middle East is destructive and self-defeating. Russia's obstructionist approach is reminiscent of the Soviet Union Cold War mentality based on a zero-sum game.
As Henry Kissinger once said, there cannot be war without Egypt, and there cannot be peace without Syria. It is the connection belt between Iran (the largest Shiite country in the region) and the Shiite population of Lebanon.