Showing 1-10 of 35 results
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West's reproach of Russian realism reeks of hypocrisy
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 09/10/2015
» It's a week since the Russians began their air strikes in Syria, and the countries that have already been bombing there for over a year -- the United States and some other Nato countries -- are working themselves up into a rage about it. The Russians are not bombing the right people, they are killing civilians, they are reckless, dangerous, and just plain evil.
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Retaliation would fulfil the terrorists' strategy
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 16/11/2015
» As always when there is a major terrorist attack on the West, the right question to ask after the slaughter in Paris is: what were the strategic aims behind it? This requires getting your head around the concept that terrorists have rational strategies, but once you have done that the motives behind the attacks are easy to figure out. It also becomes clear that the motives have changed.
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Why Turkey shot down the Russian plane in a heartbeat
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 27/11/2015
» The key fact is that the Russian plane, by Turkey's own admission, was in Turkish airspace for precisely seventeen seconds. That's a little less time than it takes to read this paragraph aloud. The Turks shot it down anyway -- and their allies publicly backed them, as loyal allies must.
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Terror is our biggest fear, but not our biggest threat
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 08/12/2015
» On Sunday President Barack Obama spoke about a mass shooting in the United States for the 17th time in the past seven years. (There have actually been 335 mass shootings in the US already this year, but he only does the big ones.) But this time Mr Obama spoke from the Oval Office.
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North Korea's real nuclear deterrent
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 11/02/2016
» Here we go again. North Korea launched a ballistic missile of intercontinental range on Sunday (saying it was just putting up a satellite) only weeks after it carried out its fourth nuclear weapons test (which it claimed was a hydrogen bomb). The United Nations Security Council strongly condemned it, and even the People's Republic of China, North Korea's only ally, expressed its "regret" at what the country had done.
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Another way of looking at the horrors of Hiroshima
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 26/05/2016
» Today's Hiroshima doesn't give the TV journalists a lot to work with. It's a bustling, mid-sized Japanese city with only few reminders of its destruction by an atomic bomb in 1945. There's the skeletal dome of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall (which was right under the blast), and discreet plaques on various buildings saying that such-and-such a middle school, with 600 students, used to be on this site, and that's all.
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Wrecked Iraq a symbol of stupidity
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 11/07/2016
» "Suppose that... the Iraqis feel ambivalent about being invaded and real Iraqis, not (just) Saddam's special guard, decide to offer resistance," wrote British prime minister Tony Blair to US president George W Bush in December 2001, two years before the US and the UK invaded Iraq. At least Mr Blair had some doubts, but neither man could really imagine that the Iraqis would see them as conquerors, not liberators.
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The US and Russia agree on Syria
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 02/08/2016
» Great states hate to admit error, so when they have to change course they generally try to disguise the fact. That's why you may not have heard much about the way that the United States has changed course in Syria in the past three months.
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Welcome all to humanity's epoch
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 02/09/2016
» Geology moves very slowly, and so do geologists. The Working Group on the Anthropocene was set up in 2009, but only presented its recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town last Monday. The Working Group's experts have concluded that we are now living in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. That is, the epoch when human beings are reshaping the Earth.
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Mosul and Aleppo, a tale of two sieges
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 21/10/2016
» Two great sieges are getting under way in the Middle East, one in Mosul in Iraq and the other in Aleppo in Syria. They have a great deal in common, including the fact that the attackers both depend heavily on foreign air power, but they are treated by most international media as though they were completely different events. How similar they are will become clearer with the passage of time.
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