It’s another Monday, and another day just flat out made for a slash-and-burn romp through the newspapers. Today’s papers once again evoked in me that old graveyard laugh. I’m not becoming a curmudgeon, I promise. It’s just that my ruminations have begun to float free of my conscious control. In other words, I just can’t […]
Adam Garfinkle
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The Middle East & Beyond
July 30, 2012
July 20, 2012
Assad on the Edge?
At least twice in my comments on Syria over the past several months I have dismissed the possibility that the Syrian opposition could summon the ability to storm the Assad regime’s “palace” and overthrow the regime by direct force. I have argued instead that the pressure mounted by the opposition was far more likely to […]
July 12, 2012
“After Notes” on the Middle East
The past several days have elapsed without my having made a comment here on matters Middle Eastern. That does not mean nothing has been going on, but nothing has happened of such a dramatic nature as to focus any extended comment. Reality does not always pour forth with punctuation marks, so that it seems to […]
July 6, 2012
Is Manaf Tlass’s Defection a Sign That Assad’s Regime Is Cracking?
The news has come that Manaf Tlass, an intimate Republican Guard friend of Bashir al-Assad, has defected to Turkey. As the press is saying, this is the most significant inner-circle defection since the beginning of the Syrian uprising. It could well be a sign that the inner circle is cracking in the belief that Assad […]
