Asia Opinion

By Jean Shaoul World Socialist Web Site, 02/05/09 Five military investigations into war crimes committed by Israeli Defence Force soldiers during Operation Cast Lead, the attack on Gaza in December-January, have ended in a whitewash. ...

By Norman H. Olsen Christian Science Monitor, 28/04/09 Bibi’s policies may be misguided, but at least he doesn’t pretend to be a peacemaker. Such intellectual honesty could prove salutary. ...

The US needs to make it clear it will not tolerate a first strike By Walt Rodgers Christian Science Monitor, 24/04/09 The new Israeli prime minister recently appeared to give President Obama a blunt ultimatum: Stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons-or we will. ...

With Washington apparently wavering, Olmert took the chance in his closing speech to the Herzliya delegates in late January 2007 to focus on the threat from Iran. He ramped up the rhetoric. ...

Israel’s failure in Lebanon, and the dismal performance of Bush’s Republican party in the mid-term Congressional elections in November 2006, put in doubt the ascendancy of the neocons for the first time. With the Democrats taking decisive control of the...

Iran and Hizbullah had good reason to fear that the assault on Lebanon-and whatever was supposed to follow it-had been planned well in advance. Nasrallah’s deputy, Sheikh Naim Qassem, certainly thought so. He told the an-Nahar daily that two days...

Had Hizbullah been beaten, what would this plan have required next? The answer, it seems, is an attack on Syria, with Israeli air strikes forcing Damascus into submission.105 According to reports in the Arab media during the early stages of...

On 24 May 2006, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was invited to address a joint session of Congress. In his widely publicised speech, he claimed that Iran stood ‘on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons’, a development that would pose...

There was no debate in Israel about which country should be targeted after Iraq; it was taken for granted that Iran should be next. The question was simply one of how to isolate Tehran and neutralise its threat to Israel’s...

Israel classifies Iran as one of those ‘far’ threats-Iraq being another-that distinguish it from the ‘near’ ones: the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states [Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon]…The closer their [Iraq and Iran’s] weapons of mass destruction programmes come to completion,...