BTEDAAI, Lebanon: Heavy gunfire characterised Baalbek’s farewell to Sobhi Fakhri Tuesday, a local killed by two individuals from the Jaafar clan over the weekend, amid a lot of anger from residents and officials that the perpetrators remain at large. The funeral procession of Fakhri was held in a local church in the town of […]

Michael Rubin, Commentary Magazine,

In 1997, against the backdrop of U.S. diplomatic outreach toward the Taliban, John Holzman, at the time the number two diplomatic official at the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan, suggested that the United States encourage engagement between the Taliban and “moderate Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and perhaps Indonesia.”

Egypt and Indonesia were certainly moderate, but to suggest that pre-9/11 Saudi Arabia would be a great venue to encourage Taliban moderation illustrates perfectly both how too many diplomats turn a blind eye to Islamist ideology promoted by allies and also treat engagement and multilateralism as panaceas.

Fast forward 17 years. What Pakistan once represented vis-à-vis the Taliban, today Turkey represents vis-à-vis many of the most extreme factions among the Syrian rebels.

President Obama has made the training of “moderate” Syrian rebels a central pillar of his strategy to take on ISIS inside Syria and a way to diminish the need for ground combat forces which he is loath to deploy back to Iraq and Syria.

Let’s put aside the fact that training such forces would take more than a year and that they would be inserted against an ISIS foe which is now battle-hardened and brutal.

And let’s also put aside the fact that there haven’t been any serious lessons learned as to why the military training program implemented in Iraq by such military luminaries as David Petraeus and current chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey has proven such an abject failure.

Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz has taken a beating in the War on Terror. His theories on warfare initially came about coincident with the development of the modern idea of the nation state. Clausewitz regarded war as being between nations.

Asymmetric warfare between transnational entities, such as Al Qaeda, has not lent itself to this analysis. Sun Tzu has been the winner as he largely thinks about battles and tactics and is not devoted to strategy.

Clausewitz has been the major shaper of the American military mind since WWII. If he were alive today and expressed himself in a tweet, it would be, “War is the extension of diplomacy by the use of violence to achieve goals of the state.” 

Thirteen years after 9/11, we can now see the involvement of nation states in these events and their aftermath, though they are often portrayed as solely the work of non-state actors.

The majority of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis. Saudi Arabia has funded the extremist Salafist madrasas in Pakistan. The Saudis’ deal with their Wahhabist base is NIMBY—not in my backyard. They have given them freedom to operate everywhere in the Islamic world—except Saudi Arabia. 

There is a strong case that some states Washington calls friends are actually enemies. Saudi Arabia, which runs the “oil brothel” most world leaders frequent, is one of them. The recent preference for Sun Tzu ends up being a “win the battle, lose the war” blueprint.

  BEIRUT: Syria’s presence in Lebanon and the debate it inspired laid the groundwork for former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination, a Lebanese MP testified before the Special Tribunal for Lebanon Monday. “These are the roots of the conflict which, in my opinion, ended with the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri,” Marwan Hamade, the MP […]

  The relatives of abducted soldiers and policemen briefly blocked on Monday several roads in the capital Beirut to demand the judiciary to lift sanctions against several Islamist inmates after jihadists threatened to start killing the captives. The families blocked Beirut’s Saifi road and near the port by setting tires on fire. The relatives had […]

  BEIRUT: For the third consecutive year, the Boghossian Foundation, an organization established to support international educational, urban, artistic and cultural projects, has awarded three prizes to young Lebanese artists and designers. In a ceremony held at Beirut Exhibition Center Saturday, organizers announced that this year’s prize winners were visual artist Chafa Ghaddar, fashion designer […]

When many Americans think of Germany, images of WWII soldiers and Hitler often come to mind. But what many people don’t realize is that Germany is the industrial powerhouse of Europe, and is a leading manufacturer of goods for export to developing Asian nations. We don’t hear about the superiority of German engineering in Volkswagen commercials for nothing!

The economic engine of the EU, Germany single-handedly saved the Eurozone from collapse in 2012. At the same time, German workers enjoy unparalleled worker protections and shorter working hours than most of their global counterparts. How can a country that works an average of 35 hours per week (with an average 24 paid vacation days to boot) maintain such a high level of productivity?
 

Working Hours Mean Working Hours

In German business culture, when an employee is at work, they should not be doing anything other than their work. Facebook, office gossip with co-workers, trolling Reddit for hours, and pulling up a fake spreadsheet when your boss walks by are socially unacceptable behaviors. Obviously, in the United States these behaviors are frowned up on by management. But in Germany, there is zero tolerance among peers for such frivolous activities.

  United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon Head of Mission and Force Commander Major-General Luciano Portolano briefed on Friday Speaker Nabih Berri and Prime Minister Tammam Salam on UNIFIL’s joint efforts with the Lebanese army to maintain calm and stability in the South and along the Blue Line. Portlando discussed with the two officials in […]

  BEIRUT: General Security banned an Iranian film that focuses on the 2009 “Green Movement” from theaters in Lebanon, the director of the Cultural Resistance International Film Festival of Lebanon told The Daily Star Saturday. “Authorities banned it, yes … because they considered it an offense to a country,” Jocelyne Saab said, adding that she […]

  International powers are seeking to pressure local authorities to stage the presidential elections, highlighting the dangers of vacuum given the developments in the region, reported the daily An Nahar on Saturday. This was emphasized by the visits of ambassadors of countries of permanent membership at the United Nations Security Council to Maronite Patriarch Beshara […]