Half a century has passed since the outbreak of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War, a vicious, multifaceted conflict characterised by sectarianism, foreign intervention, powerful militias and a state struggling to impose itself. But while the guns may have stopped firing at each other, those characteristics shape today’s Lebanon. Despite the …

If you ask someone to name the worst military or geostrategic blunders in history, the standard answers will tend to center on doomed invasions of the Russian interior, either in the form of Napoleon’s 1812 campaign or the Third Reich’s invasion of the USSR. Someone with a deeper well of …

For Israel, Qatar’s silence on a fatwa calling for “armed jihad” against the Jewish state is deafening. On April 9, Israel’s Foreign Ministry implored Doha to publicly reject the religious edict, which the Qatar-based International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) issued on March 31. The fatwa instructs Muslim governments to …