Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Karam Nama
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An awakening question: From Rousseau to Al-Husri
On a summer day in 1749, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was walking through the streets of Paris when he stumbled upon a question posted by the Academy of Dijon: Has the progress of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification and elevation of morals? It was meant as an intellectual competition,…
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Is removing Netanyahu enough to change Israel?
The question is not an attempt to predict the outcome of Israel’s upcoming election on October 27, nor is it a wager on whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fall or survive. Israel’s political landscape today is far too fractured, anxious, and ideologically rigid to be reduced to a single…
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Trump’s tug-of-war with Iran: A game of perpetual attrition
On the international political stage, war does not always manifest as a decisive confrontation that births a triumphant victor and leaves a shattered loser. Instead, the conflict between Donald Trump’s administration and the regime of Velayat-e Faqih in Tehran has devolved into a tedious, exhausting tug-of-war, a game of mutual…
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Syrian Kurds offer the region a lesson in nationhood
When I look back at my university years—sharing a dorm room with a Kurdish colleague—I am reminded of a country that once understood unity not as a slogan but as a lived experience. Iraq, despite its flaws, carried an instinctive sense of cohesion before its maps began to fracture. That…
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Rowan Williams: Guardian of the soul in an era of commercialised faith
In an age when sacred beliefs are traded in the political marketplace and theology is weaponized as a cudgel to intimidate the other, Dr. Rowan Williams—former Archbishop of Canterbury and distinguished scholar—stands as an exceptional moral and human figure. He restores faith to its pure ethical essence, transforming belief into…
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Half a million in London… millions stuffed in water jugs in Baghdad
The news that Chris Wormald, the former head of the UK civil service, has been awarded £500,000 in compensation—more than half a million dollars—after being forced out of his post without justification, is the kind of story that makes a British reader pause in disbelief. It is a large sum…
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Iraq’s electricity crisis: Fifty degrees of cold promises
In Iraq, you can replace the name of Ali Falih al-Zaidi—the current prime minister—with any prime minister since 2003, and nothing in meaning or outcome would change. Every leader has made the same promise, every leader has spoken of a “turning point,” and every leader has left office without moving…
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Political assassinations: Libya’s yesterday and today
The killing of Libyan journalist and BBC broadcaster Mohamed Mustafa Ramadan outside London’s Central Mosque in 1980, and the recent assassination of Major General Fawzi al‑Mansouri, head of military intelligence in eastern Libya, as he left a mosque in Benghazi, are separated by nearly half a century. Yet the architecture…
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Fear: The new tax on power
Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger wasn’t boasting when he said, “Cowardice is not an option in this business.” He wasn’t celebrating personal bravery either. He was simply acknowledging a reality: he no longer has the luxury of being afraid. Papperger has lived under police protection for years due to suspected Russian…
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Ali Al-Zaidi may be the failure Iraq needs
We should at least entertain the theoretical possibility that Iraq’s new prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, is not a fully formed Iranian proxy in the mold of Nouri al-Maliki or Adel Abdul Mahdi. Imagine the following scenario: al-Zaidi speaks the loud language of reform, but governs with cold pragmatism. His promises…
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Between Tehran’s defiance and Trump’s volatility: When falsehood becomes political reality
The world today feels as if it is being governed by two master fabulists—Tehran and Donald Trump—each bending reality in his own way, each forcing the geopolitical arena to treat falsehood as fact and denial as statecraft. When Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, declares that “there are currently no…
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For the first time, money is not the issue
In modern history, rarely has there been a moment of global consensus quite like this: an absolute, unified rejection by football confederations around the world of FIFA’s plan to sell a commercial stake in its tournaments, including the World Cup, to private investors through a newly proposed $20 billion entity,…
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Smart glasses that strip the world bare — and strip us with it
For decades, travellers returning from Europe to the Middle East carried stories that were more fantasy than fact—tales shaped not by reality but by the hunger of societies that knew the world only through hearsay. One of the most persistent myths of the 1940s claimed that Europeans wore special glasses…
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Why does Saudi Arabia tolerate the Houthis as a dagger in its side?
The question sounds deceptively simple, but it cuts straight into the structural weakness of how Riyadh thinks about its national security, the limits of power when it is used without strategy, and the illusion that crises can be “managed” rather than resolved. It is not just a question about Yemen…
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Al-Jawahiri… and a statue that does not recognise him
Because I belong to a generation that never lived through the era of Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri when he was truly Iraqi, I knew him as many others did: from books, from poems, and from the echo of his voice as it traversed decades of controversy and compromise. Yet, I was…
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The Green Zone’s anti‑corruption purge: Justice or a new round of spoils?
For two decades, I have never been optimistic about the political order built in Iraq after 2003. My scepticism was not emotional but structural: the state was engineered in a way that carried its own failure within it. Even Tom Barrack, the US envoy to Iraq, eventually admitted that Washington…
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Massad Boulos: Like a man calling Libyans to prayer from Malta
When Massad Boulos, the US President’s Senior Advisor for Arab and African Affairs, chooses to meet senior Libyan officials from both East and West Libya in Malta rather than in any Libyan city, he resembles a man calling the faithful to prayer from an island where no one hears the…
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Trump and Iran: The beginning of a war or just microphone noise?
What does it mean for Donald Trump to choose Ankara—politically and geographically the closest major capital to Iran—to declare that the memorandum of understanding with Tehran “is over,” and that he no longer wishes to “deal with sick leaders”? Is this simply another burst of anger from a president known…
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Rouzaina… the true face of Syria
I did not regret missing Rouzaina Lazkani’s television work as much as I regretted discovering—too late—that Syria had been hiding its true face in a place we had not looked closely enough. Rouzaina, chosen by President Ahmad al‑Shar’a as part of the complementary third of the People’s Assembly, is not…
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Zero‑sum exhaustion: The new shape of global conflict
The major geopolitical confrontations of our time have entered a phase that can only be described as zero‑sum exhaustion—a stage in which no actor wins, no actor loses decisively, and no actor possesses the capacity to impose a clear endgame. Modern wars have become long-distance marathons in which the objective…
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The arrogance of the “Guardian”: How Velayati turns falsehoods into foreign policy
Few Iranian officials embody the regime’s contempt for facts as brazenly as Aliakbar Velayati. His rhetoric recalls the early days of Ayatollah Khomeini, when mythmaking and paternalistic posturing were presented as historical destiny. Velayati—longtime adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader—does not merely distort reality; he delivers these distortions with the tone…
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Iraq’s search for a national consolation prize in football
History has not been kind to Iraqis. For more than two decades, they have lived without a single contemporary symbol capable of restoring even a fragment of their shattered national dignity. And so, they turn backwards. They return to a sentimental museum of figures who once embodied a different Iraq:…
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Who, then, will trust Trump
The war launched by President Donald Trump — cheered on with theatrical confidence by Benjamin Netanyahu — was never a war for the Iranian people, nor a strategic effort to reshape the Middle East, nor even a coherent attempt to “deter” Iran. It was a campaign without a defined end-state,…
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The politics of ‘toxic infotainment’: When the destiny of nations becomes a digital plaything
In a world that increasingly consumes its political catastrophes as daily blockbuster thrillers, Financial Times columnist Jemima Kelly recently provided a searing psychological autopsy of what she termed “Trump’s many unhappy returns.” Kelly argues that the Western political landscape has fallen into a state of “psychological stagnation.” Major political shocks…