Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Karam Nama
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The illusion of a substitute: Turkey is not the region’s replacement for Iran
Whenever the question of Iranian influence in the Middle East arises, Turkey is often presented as a ready-made alternative. The logic seems straightforward: if Iran’s power diminishes, Ankara will naturally step forward to fill the void. However, this assumption is based on a misleading comparison between two countries whose regional…
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Tell me how this war will end
We need today to revive the question General David Petraeus posed after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, launched under fabricated pretexts: “Tell me how this ends.” But we ask it now in a completely different context, as we speak about Iran and a war that seems to be moving without…
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Why do some Iraqis defend Khamenei’s regime?
To understand why some Iraqis today defend the Islamic Republic of Iran with a fervor that borders on devotion, one must return to the 1980s—specifically to the eight brutal years of the Iran–Iraq War. The answer begins there, in the trenches, before it is distorted by the post‑2003 political order…
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A regional union or a union of isolation between Iraq and Iran?
When politics collapses into a full‑fledged state of isolation, fragile states begin inventing projects that exist only on paper—or in hurried phone calls. This is precisely what Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian did when he proposed to Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid the creation of a “regional union” to promote development…
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Al-Sudani deserves political pity
The statement issued by the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, announcing the summoning of the US chargé d’affaires and handing him a “strongly worded” protest note, as reported by Reuters, appears in the balance of realpolitik closer to a performance of sovereignty in a country that does…
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Moscow will not shed political tears for Tehran
The Nowruz greeting Vladimir Putin sent to Iran’s leadership and people is little more than a seasonal postcard—politically meaningless in a time of war. The Kremlin announced that Putin had extended congratulations to Mojtaba Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian on the occasion of the Iranian New Year. But anyone familiar…
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How can we understand Oman’s middle path toward Iran?
Several years ago, I asked a senior Omani scholar a question that has puzzled many in the Arab world: why does Muscat maintain such deep mutual trust with Tehran, despite decades of Iranian behavior that convinced most Arab states that Iran is not a reliable partner? He answered with quiet…
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Iraq’s sovereignty dilemma between Washington and Tehran
No modern state has suffered as much as Iraq in trying to define the meaning of sovereignty since 2003. Here, “sovereignty” is not a constitutional principle but a definitional trap—one that grows more convoluted as the conflict between the United States and Iran deepens, and as Iraq turns into an…
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Iraq’s militias: From guns for hire to checkbooks of power
Iraq’s militias cannot be understood as mere security actors or as simple extensions of regional power politics. Rather, they represent a fully formed political economy that emerged from the wreckage of the state and evolved into a cross-border network of interests. This network is not governed by ideology or loyalty,…
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Controlling Iran’s skies does not mean the regime will fall to the ground
When Caroline Levitt says that the United States is “steadily moving toward control of Iranian airspace” within four to six weeks, she is talking about a military equation, not a rule equation. We have seen this movie before: the skies can be occupied, but the ground is not governed by…
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The War Being Rewritten… and the Lesson No One Wants to Learn
Opposing a war on Iran is not an emotional stance, nor is it an alignment with Tehran’s theocratic regime—a regime that has been cruel enough to harm its own people first, and to export an ideology of domination to its neighbors second. Iran’s rulers, with all their ideological and security…
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For Trump, war is a game of tug-of-war
Many mistakenly believed — or preferred to believe — that President Donald Trump disliked war, or that he was practising some form of covert coercive diplomacy aimed at extracting limited concessions from Tehran. While Trump may care deeply about a few non-military issues, on most others he is shaped by…
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Subjecting geography to power does not make history a coward
What is unfolding today between Iraq and Kuwait reopens a wound that never fully healed. Once again, geography is being subjected to political force—less about technical borders than about unsettled memory. More than three decades after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the relationship between the two states remains shaped not only…
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In waiting for the light: The hidden philosophy of Ramadan
In a world where eating has become a solitary act, snatched quickly in front of a screen or in the corner of an office, Ramadan arrives to restore the rhythm that modern life has quietly eroded. Not only the rhythm of the body, but the rhythm of community itself. The…
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What if Jeremy Bowen were in Gaza?
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s veteran Middle East editor, once offered a deceptively simple formula for surviving the moral challenges of conflict reporting. A journalist, he said, can be both neutral and candid. In a region where truth is often held hostage by governments, militias and armies of citizen journalists, Bowen’s…
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Has Washington come to its senses in Iraq?
Twenty-three years after the invasion of Iraq, Washington seems to have suddenly regained its senses — or worse, to be a detached observer of a catastrophe that it did not create. However, the record does not permit such lenient forgiveness. The United States is not an impartial bystander to Iraq’s…
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No one welcomes the occupation of Iran, but the fall of the regime is another matter
Anyone in this region who has experienced occupation firsthand cannot welcome the occupation of Iran. The memory of Iraq alone is enough to make talk of foreign tanks crossing the border a recurring nightmare. The occupation of Iraq and the destruction of its state were not a passing incident in…
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The death of Saif al-Islam was not the surprise, his survival was
There is little reason for observers to be shocked by the fate that finally caught up with him, killed in an operation that remains murky even now. Herodotus’s old saying, ‘Out of Libya, always something new’, was never a promise of wonder. Rather, it was a warning about a land…
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Harari deconstructs the Israeli narrative from within
It is rare for an Israeli voice to emerge from the heart of crisis and articulate what politics itself cannot. Yet Yuval Noah Harari—neither a politician nor an agent of state power, but a globally respected social thinker—has done precisely that. He argues that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is no longer…
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Is Britain really stepping out of Washington’s shadow?
Two recent messages from Prime Minister Keir Starmer to President Donald Trump have been interpreted by some in Westminster as indications of a new British stance: more assertive and less deferential, and perhaps even bordering on strategic independence. However, on closer inspection, these gestures reveal something more subtle and telling:…
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Nouri al-Maliki: The old disaster in a new wrapper
Nouri al-Maliki has never been the solution for Iraq. Not during his eight years in power. Not in the decade that followed his departure. And not during the country’s long collapse since 2003. He has always been part of the problem, never the solution. Today, amid growing talk of his…
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Netanyahu’s veto: The Peace Council that cannot bite
Nothing about Donald Trump’s invitation for Benjamin Netanyahu to join the proposed ‘Peace Council’ for Gaza changes the Israeli prime minister’s calculations. Netanyahu, accustomed to disregarding international resolutions, does not view any multilateral framework as anything more than a piece of paper he can ignore or tear apart without consequence,…
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The guilty cannot fix the world
Global billionaire wealth reached an unprecedented peak in 2025. Oxfam described this as a moment that “undermines political freedom” and deepens inequality. The organisation’s annual inequality report presented shocking numbers and offered a diagnosis of a global pathology. When twelve billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of humanity…
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When old myths about Iran and Israel are dusted off again
The phrase long used by the Israeli Mossad to describe its relationship with Iran — ‘a friendly enemy is better than a hostile friend’ — sprang to mind as I read Junaid S. Ahmad’s recent Middle East Monitor article, ‘Real men go to Tehran — The Zion-Con fantasy of regime…