Geography Archives: Iran

Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela.  His cartoons frequently appear in Aporrea and Rebelión among other sites.  Cf. “Lebanon: Saad Hariri Calls for Syrian Regime Change; Maybe Iran Too” (24 August 2006, leaked to WikiLeaks, published in Al-Akhbar); “Turkey Comments on Syrian Ihvan’s Meeting in Istanbul” (World Bulletin, 2 April 2011); المراقب العام للأخوان […]

  Firing for Media Effect: Setting the “African” Agenda “We left behind our friends from Chad.  We left behind their bodies.  We had 70 or 80 people from Chad working for our company.  They cut them dead with pruning shears and axes, attacking them, saying you’re providing troops for Gadhafi.  The Sudanese, the Chadians were […]

  Presidential chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei has said that he has not decided yet to run for the 2013 presidential election. “Ask about my candidacy for the presidential election six months before the election,” he told reporters on Saturday when asked about his plans for the next presidential election. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s close […]

We return from a recent trip to the region persuaded that the main question engaging people with respect to the “Arab spring” is no longer “who’s next,” but rather “how far will Saudi Arabia go in pushing a counter-revolutionary agenda” across the Middle East?  Whether Saudi Arabia is really capable of coping with the momentous […]

  The US left and progressives have been preoccupied about what we can do to impact events in the Mid-East, particularly obsessing about what we can do to counter US intervention.  In general, it is good to want to act, not just talk or analyze, in a crisis situation. However, despite the valiant and necessary […]

The full extent of the ramifications of the extraordinary developments in Egypt since the beginning of this year — for Egypt itself, for the Middle East, and for the world — will not be clear for some time.  At this juncture, though, it seems virtually certain that post-Mubarak Egypt will have a much more balanced […]

Millions of Syrians rallied all over Syria, pledging loyalty to the country, in support of Bashar al-Assad, on 29 March 2011.  The dialectic of the regime and the opposition in Syria, it is safe to say, is neither like Tunisia and Egypt, nor like Iraq and Libya.  Instead, it is more like what happened in […]

The multinational empire has come up with a great deal for itself: using Libya’s own money to finance the Libyan rebels to fight against Libya.  Ali Tarhouni, a US-educated economist who just got appointed “finance minister” of the rebel “Interim Transitional National Council,” explains the deal: “Right now, there is no immediate crisis kind of […]

The Empire admits: without Al-Jazeera, they could not have bombed Libya. How did Al-Jazeera, once dubbed the ‘terror network’ by some and whose staff were martyred by US bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, end up becoming the media war propagandist for yet another Western war against a small state of the Global South, Libya?  We […]

Fidel Castro was right.  The West was planning an attack on a sovereign third world nation imminently: Libya.  Nothing like a good old war against brown and black people in Libya by the West to remind oneself of what Western civilisation is all about.  Many of us who have been politically active since the 1990s […]

The Tunisian revolution has wiped out the Ben Ali system, and the Egyptian revolution is about to eliminate the Mubarak system after the fall of the president.  No doubt, the epoch of unlimited domination in the Arab world is coming to its end.  After decades of despotic, patronage-based regimes, the Arab peoples seem determined to […]

In 2007, Gaddafi expressed ambitions to revive a Fatimid state to create the foundations for a renaissance in North Africa, in a bid to attract the attention of Shia scholars and leaders.  In vain — for he unapologetically also expressed shockingly undemocratic sentiments to the effect that elections and coups are no different!  His failed […]

“‘Today?’ asked the younger cook, as he placed a very large skewer on the charcoal.  ‘Is anyone supposed to come out today?’  ‘Yes,’ I said after a short pause, pretending not to be that interested.  ‘It’s the seventh day of mourning for the people who died last week.’  The young man rolled his eyes, the […]

Which way to look?  So much was happening inside and outside Germany!  Most dramatic were the revolutionary events on the southern shores of the Mediterranean.  Aside from amazement that those decade-long dictators could be forced out by the will of the people, there were some worries among sun-seeking German vacationers who annually flee the icy […]

  Patty Culhane: Now that shots have been fired in the name of Bahrain’s government, a key ally to the US and home to the strategically critical US Navy base, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seems to be showing some support for the Bahraini government’s position. . . . Danielle Pletka, American Enterprise Institute: Not […]

On 22 Bahman 1389 (11 February 2011), the 32nd anniversary of the victory of the revolution in Iran, hard-line women heckle Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, the right-hand man of the president of Iran.  The hecklers are heard shouting: “Down with monafeq!  Monafeq, get lost!”  “Mashaei, be ashamed!  Resign from the government!”  “Down with the anti-velayat-e faqih.”  […]

7 February 2011 . . . Today we declare our solidarity.  One of the forms of our solidarity is to defend this revolution, this intifada, this great historic popular movement.  One of the responsibilities of defending this revolution is to reveal its true image as all data indicate. . . .  We contact those on […]

In 2002 Iran was added to the neoconservative-designed ‘Axis of Evil’ and thus declared ripe for US military intervention. The threat of war in the ‘greatest crisis of modern times’ (John Pilger in the New Statesman, July 12, 2007) was at its height in 2006-2007.  With President Obama assuming office in 2009, a great hope […]

  What explains the diametrically opposed stances of the imperialist powers and corporate media: promoting regime change in Iran while endeavoring to preserve the fundamentals of the regimes, with or without modification, in Egypt and Tunisia?  In part, the increasingly anachronistic legacy of the policy and ideology about Israel developed in the wake of the […]

Vijay Prashad is a prominent Marxist scholar from South Asia.  He is George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Connecticut.  He has written extensively on international affairs for both academic and popular journals.  His most recent book The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the […]