As the Syrian crisis worsens the Obama administration is accelerating its planning with ME allies , to secure the country’s scattered stocks of chemical weapons

By Joseph I. Lieberman
More than nine months after President Obama declared that Bashar al-Assad must go, it is clear that neither diplomacy nor sanctions alone will dislodge the Syrian dictator

By David Ignatius
Whenever the CIA uncovers a new plot overseas, like al-Qaeda’s latest scheme to blow up civilian aircraft using advanced, hard-to-detect explosives, people breathe a sigh of relief.

By Roula Khalaf
A year ago, Lebanon was bracing for trouble. With Syria’s uprising raging next door – and politics in Beirut divided along pro and anti-Syrian lines many assumed it would be a matter of time

by Ghassan Karam
To pretend the availability of a commodity or service when in fact access to the item in question is severely restricted can be deadly as the Noble laureate Amartya Sen has clearly demonstrated

By Ian Bremmer: Drawn-out wars, economic struggles, exploding debt — it’s easy to point to these signs and conclude that America is in an irreversible decline;

By Thomas L. Friedman: And so it came to pass that in 2012 — a year after the Arab awakening erupted — the U.S. made two financial commitments to the Arab world that each began with the Nos. 1 and 3.

By: Ed Husain: When I was invited to visit Bahrain by members of the royal family, I hesitated. They had crushed peaceful protesters last year, and their police had used tear gas against human rights activists.

For a year, a chorus of pundits has been proclaiming that the Arab Spring has ushered in a new era in the Middle East in which the United States no longer is the “indispensable nation” Bill Clinton once described. Syria has proved them wrong.

By Ian Pannell
As the UN expresses dismay at continuing violence in Syria, optimism is still found amid the ruins, in some parts of the country..

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
AS I walk around the streets of Beirut, that verse from “The Sounds of Silence” keeps rattling around in my head: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls …”

By: Charles Krauthammer
Last year President Barack Obama ordered U.S. intervention in Libya under the doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect.” To stand by and do nothing “would have been a betrayal of who we are,” explained the president. But what has he done for Syria? Stand idly by.

by Ghassan Karam
It is especially ironic when the government that is expected to guard and protect the interest of the public becomes the most important player in perpetuating deception and false calculus.

A new wave of deportations of Lebanese nationals living in the UAE is underway, following the collective expulsion of a number of families in 2009.

While the world focuses on the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing the increasingly violent conflict, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in Syria , have been all but forgotten.

No regime in history has built, in the span of six decades, the number of walls the paranoid regime in Tel Aviv has erected and it plans at least five more.

The U.S. and its NATO allies ought to know from the Arab League’s disastrous monitoring mission in Syria last year that observers will not stop the regime’s violence.

By Randa Slim, CNN – The six-point peace plan for Syria proposed by Kofi Annan is doomed to fail for one simple reason: Neither President Bashar al-Assad nor the government opposition is interested in making it work.

Why is the counter-revolutionary force stronger than the revolutionary force which is calling for a revolution in Lebanon similar to what we have seen elsewhere in the Arab Spring?

By: Dr Alia Brahimi
Sentiment about Syria in Lebanon is mixed, as refugees flood in and survive thanks to goodwill.

As enthusiasm for Islamist parties grows in the Arab world questions abound about what shape political Islam will take. Hamas, an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has not set a good example in clean governance in Gaza for others to follow

Many of the activists who began the uprising in Syria more than a year ago feel their peaceful push for change has been hijacked by the rebel Free Syrian Army.

By Robert Fisk
Shot in the heart. By the Syrians. Forty bullets hit the cameraman’s car and that of his fellow crew at Wadi Khaled in north Lebanon

B: James Foley
“What can we do? Do we need to have 100 or 200 die a day for the world to help?” asked one rebel, who had defected from the Syrian army.

A civil war is taking place in Syria. Mr. Obama may believe that by fleeing from leadership through figments such as the Annan plan, he is avoiding “militarization.” In fact, he is ensuring that thousands more people will die.

The forces of Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, have been killing Syrians mercilessly for 13 months while the world has fumbled for a credible strategy to remove him from office.

A young writer living in Syria’s capital city has agreed to share some observations of the uprisings and subsequent crackdowns happening across the country

By David Ignatius
President Obama has signaled Iran that the U.S. would accept an Iranian civilian nuclear program if Ayatollah Khamenei can back up his recent public claim that his nation “will never pursue nuclear weapons.”

By: Abdallah Ghomi ,
In firmly siding with the Syrian regime in its brutal onslaught to remain in power, Iran has reversed the tide of sympathy with Shiism that resulted from Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel.

By Sarra Grira
More than two decades after Lebanon’s civil war ended, it remains a very touchy subject for the government there

By Eric Asimov
In his 72 years, Serge Hochar has produced 53 vintages of Château Musar, a wine that has enthralled several generations only partly because of its unusual provenance, the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.

By John Cantlie
Assad deployed tanks to crush northern rebel strongholds in the town of Saraqeb. A first hand account of the total destruction of an entire town.

By Ghassan Karam
Many in the world are already celebrating the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day and that is understandable

By Alison Flood
Rabee Jaber is the youngest recipient of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

By Jens Juul Petersen
A FIFA-approved specially designed headscarf will Muslim women to play soccer again.

By Robert Fisk
As Assad’s troops fire shots across the border into Lebanon, the nation’s religious factions remain bitterly divided on how to tackle their neighbour from hell: President Assad

By Matthew Levitt
Should Hizballah decide to carry out attacks on U.S. soil in the event of a military confrontation with Iran, it has the capacity to do so.