One might wonder – as many South Africans probably do – why there have been, and probably will be, no consequences for those implicated by the revelations in Jacques Pauw’s recent book, The President’s Keepers (NB Publishers, 2017). And I don’t mean only in the light of his revelations (it’s still a bit early); I […]
Iran
Posted inNews/Politics
Iranian elections hail new era of dialogue
The ushering to power of a “reformist” in Iran’s recent elections happened not because of the government influence, but in spite of it. Having the stigma of a doubtful presidential election result from 2010 many experts and Iran watchers expected similar problems with last week’s election. But with an estimated 50% of Iran’s 50 million registered […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Boston, media bias and problem with quantifying life and death
Invariably when a tragedy such as the Boston bombing occurs in the US, UK or any other “western” nation, the bloodshed is compared, quantitatively, with the violence in Iraq, Syria, or any other nation that is not in the “west”. Within minutes of the detonation of the bombs in Boston, my Facebook feed was producing […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Syria a geopolitical minefield
Emerging from the widely hailed Arab Spring revolutions is a new threat to world stability and security. The very breadth of the scale of the uprising, stretching across the whole of North Africa and into the Middle East, has ramifications well beyond the region. Traditional world powers like Russia and the US have suffered a […]
Posted inGeneral
Iran and World War III
Geopolitics is generally a complex issue to tackle, mainly because it is highly speculative, with a lot of determinations resting on what each country’s intelligence chooses to tell us. Even more tricky is the fact that each country has strategic interests that are, more often than not, the be-all and end-all of their foreign policy […]