Cheetah786
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Nobody can predict which way the Arab Awakening will turn this year. But Robert Fisk has ventured a very tentative punt or two
Syria
Yes, Assad will go. One day. He says as much. But dont expect it to happen in the immediate future. Or Gaddafi-style.
Israel and the Palestinian territories
Hamas and Khaled Meshaal will go on denying Israels right to exist thus allowing Israel to falsely claim that it has no one to talk to until the next Gaza war.
Iran
Israel has no stomach for an all-out war against Iran it would lose and the United States, having lost two Middle East wars, has no enthusiasm for losing a third.
Saudi Arabia
There are those who say that the Gulf kingdoms will remain secure for years to come. Dont count on it. Watch Saudi Arabia.
Iraq
Its own civil war will go on grinding up the bones of civil society while we largely ignore its agony.
US
Now that Obama has entered his drone-happy second presidency, were going to hear more about those wonderful unpiloted bombers.
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 lets say this for 2013: the Arab Awakening (the title of George Antonius seminal work of 1938) will continue, the demand for dignity and freedom let us not get tramelled up here with democracy will go on ravaging the pseudo-stability of the Middle East, causing as much fear in Washington as it does in the palaces of the Arab Gulf.
Could Saudi Arabia be next? *|* Peak Oil News and Message Boards
Syria
Yes, Assad will go. One day. He says as much. But dont expect it to happen in the immediate future. Or Gaddafi-style.
Israel and the Palestinian territories
Hamas and Khaled Meshaal will go on denying Israels right to exist thus allowing Israel to falsely claim that it has no one to talk to until the next Gaza war.
Iran
Israel has no stomach for an all-out war against Iran it would lose and the United States, having lost two Middle East wars, has no enthusiasm for losing a third.
Saudi Arabia
There are those who say that the Gulf kingdoms will remain secure for years to come. Dont count on it. Watch Saudi Arabia.
Iraq
Its own civil war will go on grinding up the bones of civil society while we largely ignore its agony.
US
Now that Obama has entered his drone-happy second presidency, were going to hear more about those wonderful unpiloted bombers.
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 lets say this for 2013: the Arab Awakening (the title of George Antonius seminal work of 1938) will continue, the demand for dignity and freedom let us not get tramelled up here with democracy will go on ravaging the pseudo-stability of the Middle East, causing as much fear in Washington as it does in the palaces of the Arab Gulf.
Could Saudi Arabia be next? *|* Peak Oil News and Message Boards
