Hichem Karoui…Papers

Hichem Karoui 

The Gulf Today, July 22, 2012

It is well the American intelligence services that identified the suicide-bomber who had carried out the attack of Burgas  (July 18) as a “member of a Hizbollah cell operating in Bulgaria,” according to The New York Times (July 19). Israel’s own assertions have been, thus, confirmed.

What did Israeli and US intelligence services provide as evidence for their charges against Hizbollah and Iran? The question is still there. But maybe they think there is no need to answer.

In the shady world of wars between opposite spy services, every party knows his part and the part of the adversary in any case. Read more

Hichem Karoui

The Gulf Today, July 15, 2012

In an apparent response to reports that the US has increased its military presence in the Gulf, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ air force said that missiles had been aimed at 35 US military bases in the Gulf as well as targets in Israel, ready to be launched in case of an attack.

My take is if the Americans are afraid of Iran, it is not a good sign for the Islamic Republic. I’ll explain why.

According to The Atlantic (April 19, 2012), in November 1985, CNN commissioned a poll asking Americans to gauge the Soviet Union’s threat to the US. At the time, 39,000 Soviet nuclear warheads were pointed at the rest of the world, enough of them ready on push-button alert to destroy the United States near-instantaneously and many times over. Read more

When they started negotiating on the basis of the Oslo accords (and even prior to them), the Israelis aimed primarily at two key goals:

* Getting the recognition of the State of Israel , as a permanent, legitimate part of the region, from the Arab states.

* Subsequently, getting secure and recognised boundaries from threats or acts of force.

One is well obliged to state that none of these two important objectives has been reached. Israel therefore failed.

The PLO, which is not a state forced on people, but a grassroots organisation, had a different goal. Read more

Hichem Karoui

The Gulf Today, July 01, 2012

Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, many assumptions were made about the possible spread of the revolt throughout the Arab world, which assumedly would topple all the regimes-members of the Arab League, one after another. The naivety of such assumptions hardly needs to be overemphasised. The people who made them seemed to exclude the fact that even though the Arabs constitute virtually a single nation, they have always been determined and ruled by varied and contrasted interests, due to the accumulation of multiple historical experiences.  Read more