Apropos the post yesterday on how the US is trying to somehow establish a positive profile in the Middle East, and elsewhere, it might as well forget it if the article in today's Independant is even half-accurate! Winning over the hearts and minds of those in the Arab-world hasn't got a hope. Just reflect for a moment. What would the leaders of the West be saying if it were the Iraqis paying to see dead American army personnel as some sort of porn. Probably, something like John Howard's infamous comment in relation to the so-called Tampa incident that "we don't want those sort of people in our country".
There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives? In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t
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