Geography Archives: Iran

The Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the United States, Yousef Al-Otaiba, is in the news for comments he made yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival — comments in which he apparently expressed some measure of support for a U.S. military attack on Iranian nuclear targets.  We have known Yousef since before his […]

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had sent Syria a “sophisticated radar system that could threaten Israel’s ability to launch a surprise attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”  The story cited reporting from “two Israeli officials, two U.S. officials and a Western intelligence source,” and was “confirmed . . . by […]

  As the United States government does what it can to halt Iran’s nuclear program, it may be suspected that it is seeking to build up its own nuclear industry, denying Iran the capacity to develop its own technology while pressuring it to open itself up for US technological export and to become dependent on […]

I promised that I would be the “happiest man in the world if I was wrong” but, unfortunately, my happiness was short-lived. The World Cup has still not ended. There are six days left to go before the final. What an exceptional opportunity the yanki empire and the fascist state of Israel might miss for keeping […]

  Nelida Fuccaro.  Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.  xvi + 257 pp.  $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-51435-4. In many ways, the city of Manama (now the capital of Bahrain) shares affinities with other Gulf city-states.  Like Dubai, Kuwait, and Muscat, the port city drew […]

Earlier this month, after the United Nations Security Council authorized new multilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic by adopting Resolution 1929, the member states of the European Union (EU) approved guidelines for expanding European sanctions against Iran.  Any new sanctions that the EU might apply against Iran on the basis of the new guidelines must […]

  Act I In the second half of the 1990s, at the onset of his first term as Brazil’s president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, or FHC for short, faced a dilemma.  To honor his recent conversion to the Washington Consensus, he had to get rid of State companies to make money to pay the interests on […]

The name BP is now forever ingrained in people’s minds as the oil giant responsible for what has become the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history.  But the mammoth oil spill resulting from the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t the first time British Petroleum has brought disaster […]

BP, the company responsible for what is already the worst single-source environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, is the largest corporation in Britain, fourth largest in the world, and the world’s third largest energy company.  Over the course of its 100-year history, this company has caused a number of environmental and workplace disasters. But the harm […]

Israeli human-rights groups and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, have condemned a decision by Israel to expel four Palestinian politicians from East Jerusalem by the end of this week. The Israeli government revoked their residency rights in Jerusalem a few weeks ago, after claiming they were “in breach of trust” for belonging […]

Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign minister, set out last week what he called a “blueprint for a resolution to the conflict” with the Palestinians that demands most of the country’s large Palestinian minority be stripped of citizenship and relocated outside Israel’s future borders. Warning Israel faced growing diplomatic pressure for a full withdrawal to the […]

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah will come to Washington for a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday; there is little doubt that Iran will be a high-priority topic for discussion between the two leaders.  Notwithstanding the extraordinary importance of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, it is striking how relatively few meetings there are between American presidents and Saudi […]

Maziar Behrooz.  Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran.  I.B. Tauris, 2000. The role of the left in the Iranian Revolution is complicated, what Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek would call the ‘vanishing mediator’ of the event.  The fact that at their peak Iranian Marxists commanded the loyalty of millions, and […]

  This month, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed a resolution to tighten sanctions on Iran, imposing a ban on arms sales and expanding a freeze on assets of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in response to the country’s uranium-enrichment activities, which Tehran says are for peaceful purposes but other countries contend are driven […]

  Two weeks ago, the 10th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council summit, held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, approved the SCO Rules of Procedure and the regulation on procedure for future membership expansion. Before the summit, Chinese diplomats ritually pointed out that approval of the admission regulations was the first step in forming the basis for a […]

  What the group around Khomeini succeeded in doing was to unite behind it a wide section of the middle class — both the traditional petty bourgeoisie based in the bazaar and many of the first generation of the new middle class — in a struggle to control the hierarchies of power.  The secret of […]

The text below is an excerpt from “Imperialism and the Gulf War,” which was first published as the “Review of the Month” of the April 1991 issue of Monthly Review (42.11).  While the exact character of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party state is certainly debatable (“lack of government corruption”? — only relatively so in comparison to […]

Russia’s Iran Policy Since the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic has worked hard to cultivate a strategic partnership with post-Soviet Russia.  Of course, for many Iranians, there is heavy historical “baggage” attached to relations with Russia/the Soviet Union.  But, from an Iranian perspective, Russia is […]

H.R.2194 (the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2009) passed the Senate by a vote of 99-1 and the House by a vote of 408-8 (1 “present” and 16 “not voting”) yesterday. — Ed. The U.S. Congress, in its infinite wisdom, passed a new piece of legislation authorizing the President to impose so-called […]

WHEN these lines are published tomorrow, Friday, in Granma newspaper, the 26th of July, a date on which we always recall with pride the honor of having resisted the onslaughts of the empire, will still be in the distance, despite it being only 32 days away. Those who determine every step of the worst enemy of […]