Tony Blair has been a political salesman since he first made his debut at the British Labour Party conferences. And he is good, no doubt about that.

Not only because he speaks coherently; he is Scottish after all. Nor is it because he's often compared to George W Bush.

It's...

While we have been fixated on successive Arab breakthroughs and victories against tyranny and extremism, Washington is failing miserably but discreetly in Afghanistan.

The American media's one-obsession-at-a-time coverage of global affairs might have put the spotlight on President Obama's slow and poor reaction to the breathtaking developments...

In much of the world's media, the story of the popular revolution that transformed Egypt goes like this: an oppressed people who had suffered bitterly in silence suddenly decided that enough was enough and spontaneously rose up to claim their freedom.

Like most revolutions, however, this one...

Since taking office, President Obama has been more of a manager than a leader. Mostly, he has managed expectations - but also the deteriorating foreign policy he inherited from his predecessor.

He made symbolic foreign policy gestures to please his progressive and liberal supporters, as well as enacting new policies...

What does it say about Washington's ''War on Terror'' that a dozen and a half people with paper cutters forced hundreds of thousands of Western troops into the battlefields of the "greater Middle East" region?

That 100,000 foreign soldiers are bugged down in occupied Afghanistan and held...

According to tribal Yemeni tradition, if a dispute has been resolved peacefully, any dagger that has been drawn cannot go back into its scabbard unless it tastes blood. Traditionally, an animal is slaughtered to satisfy its thirst and restore its holder's honour.

In that spirit, with the...

I could only shake my head in amazement as I listened to President Obama -- ahead of his New York meeting with Israeli premier Netanyahu and Palestinian 'president' Mahmoud Abbas -- trying to put a brave face on his administration's failure to convince Israel to freeze all settlement activities in...