Conflicts Forum

Alastair Crooke
Whilst America has been absorbed by the Afghan election imbroglio, a less-noticed event slid into place in the Middle East. It is less dramatic than President Karzai’s near removal; but this event tilts the strategic balance: Turkey finally shrugged off its US straight-jacket; stared-past any beckoning EU membership, and has fixed its eyes toward […]

Commentary by Alastair Crooke
New Global Studies Vol. 3 : Issue 2, Article 4. Published by The Berkeley Electronic Press
BEIRUT – Many commentators on Islam make the same mistake: They instinctively assume that Muslim resistance to western globalisation reflects the inability of Muslims to accept the social and structural change that ‘modernity’ requires. Muslims, in this […]

By Alastair Crooke
The country is emerging as a regional power. Is the West ready for that?
It was pure drama: The leaders of the United States, Britain, and France stepped onto the stage at the Pittsburgh Group of 20 meeting last week to unveil Western intelligence that showed that Iran had a second nuclear fuel enrichment […]

By Alastair Crooke, Conflicts Forum, July 9, 2009
The troubles that followed the Iranian Presidential elections have – with rare exceptions – been misread by the Western press and policymakers; it was not an East European model ‘colour revolution’; nor was Presidential candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi’s movement an uprising of liberal westernised sympathisers against the principles […]

By Mark Perry, Bitter Lemons, June 18, 2009
We in the “the West” have a special place in our traditions for anniversaries. We celebrate two important ones just now. It was twenty years ago that thousands of children arrived in China’s Tiananmen Square to petition their leaders for greater rights. They built a papier-mache statue of […]

By Alastair Crooke, New Perspectives Quarterly, June 2, 2009
Most Western analysts of political Islam make the same mistake. They instinctively assume that conflict with the West has mainly to do with specific foreign policies, particularly of the U.S. with respect to Israel, the Arab world and Iran, and, if those changed, all would be well.
In […]