Instead of ending the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama applies a bandage of speech. Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist. This cartoon was published in his blog on 5 May 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes. The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi. See, also, Gareth […]
Geography Archives: Iraq
Revealing Moments: Obama, WikiLeaks, the “Good War” Myth, and Silly Liberal Faith in the Emperor
War Crime Whistleblower in Obama’s Sights, War Criminals Not Private First Class Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq, is being prosecuted by the Obama administration for disclosing a classified video showing American troops murdering civilians in Baghdad from an Apache Attack Helicopter in 2007. Eleven adults were killed in the […]
Sanctions, the TRR, and the Future of Nuclear Diplomacy: An Iranian Perspective
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said earlier this week that the Islamic Republic is prepared to stop enriching uranium to the nearly-20 percent level required to fabricate fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), if others agree to provide new, finished fuel for the TRR, in line with the Joint Declaration that Iran negotiated with […]
Sending a Message, Setting a Precedent: Nuclear Powers vs. Iran, Brazil, Turkey, and Other Emerging Powers
In international politics, if an action seems reckless or callous and the ones taking it are not certified loonies, usually it’s because it was made to look that way, on purpose. To send a message. Take Israel’s attack in international waters on a civilian flotilla that resulted in the death of nine Turkish passengers. […]
Co-opting the Anti-Nuclear Movement
No medium of propaganda is as powerful and effective as film. Think of the classics, the most notorious efforts to sway the public with the electrifying and collective passion of cinema: racial apartheid was justified in the US with Birth of a Nation. The Soviets glorified their revolution with The Battleship Potemkin. Then there was […]
Military Action against Iran: Impact and Effects
Executive Summary: This report concludes that military action against Iran should be ruled out as a means of responding to its possible nuclear weapons ambitions. The consequences of such an attack would lead to a sustained conflict and regional instability that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran […]
Srebrenica 15 Years After: The Politicization of “Genocide”
It has become an annual ritual each July to commemorate the “Srebrenica massacre,” which dates back to July 11-16, 1995. The now institutionalized characterization is that “8,000 [Bosnian Muslim] men and boys” were executed by the Serbs at that time, in “the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War.” This memorial is […]
Netanyahu: America Won’t Get in Our Way
There is one video Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, must be praying never gets posted on YouTube with English subtitles. To date, the 10-minute segment has been broadcast only in Hebrew on Israel’s Channel 10. Its contents, however, threaten to gravely embarrass not only Mr. Netanyahu but also the US administration of Barack Obama. […]
Iraq: Allawi or Maliki?
Iraq turns to Paul the Octopus of the 2010 World Cup fame: “Just pick the prime minister, form a government, and save us.” Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist. This cartoon was published in his blog on 16 July 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes. The text above is an interpretation of […]
A New Order in “Greater West Asia”: AfPak to Palestine
When the Soviet Union was in terminal crisis in 1990 and the prospect emerged of the United States establishing long-term domination of the international political system, the influential Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer sought to capture the character of the unfolding geopolitical era. The term he used became a buzzword in then-emerging neo-conservative circles, and […]
Desperately Seeking “Defectors” to Make a Case for an Iran War
Coverage of Shahram Amiri’s departure from the United States and his return to Iran has focused, rather superficially, on the question of whether he was kidnapped or defected and then changed his mind. Frankly, we are more interested in what reports that the CIA tried to pay Amiri $5 million say about the current political […]
To War?
“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned . . . everywhere is war.” — Bob Marley, “War,” 1976 (lyrics adapted from a speech by Haile Selassie I at the UN in 1963) Every few months the specter of a new American war in the […]
‘God Helps Those Who Help Themselves’: Interview with Norman G. Finkelstein, Part 1
Norman Finkelstein is one of the world’s foremost public intellectuals writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is the author of many books on the topic, most recently Beyond Chutzpah, an exhaustive account of Israel’s human rights record, and This Time We Went Too Far (reviewed in New Left Project), an analysis of the Gaza massacre […]
Netanyahu Pushes the United States to Make War on Iran: Will Obama Say No?
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States last week was capped off on Sunday with the broadcast of a previously-taped interview on Fox New Sunday. The interview covered a range of important topics, including the state of the U.S.-Israel relationship and prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace. But it is the Prime Minister’s remarks […]
Goodbye to Turkey or Goodbye to Good versus Evil?
The West is worried about Turkey. Its spokespeople fear that the West might have “lost” Turkey since its Prime Minister, Recep Erdoğan, associated himself with President Lula, proposed to act as intermediary between the West and Iran, and, later, reacted with determination against Israel’s violent raid on a boat sailing under the Turkish flag and […]
Apartheid South Africa’s Secret Relationship with Israel
Thank you for having me, Yousef [Munayyer], and thank you all for coming out on a day when it’s over 100 degrees. I know it wasn’t easy. I’m going to talk a little about the research that went into this book [The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa] and where my interest […]
Gulf Arab Support for Attacking Iran: The Strange Case of the UAE
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 […]
Interview with Dissident Israeli Intellectual Michel Warschawski: “Obama’s Priority Is Iran”
Israeli intellectual Michel Warschawski said yesterday, at the European Social Forum in Istanbul, that he is certain that US President Barack Obama’s priority is a war against Iran. Warschawski was taking part in a seminar on how the international Palestine solidarity movement can challenge Israeli impunity. Warschawski, founder of the Alternative Information Center in […]
Genocide Denial and Genocide Facilitation: Gerald Caplan and The Politics of Genocide
In his June 17 “review” of our book The Politics of Genocide, for Pambazuka News,1 Gerald Caplan, a Canadian writer who Kigali’s New Times described as a “leading authority on Genocide and its prevention,”2 focuses almost exclusively on the section we devote to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.3 Caplan says virtually nothing about […]
Austerity: Why and for Whom?
Clearly, the global capitalist crisis that started in 2007 will be neither short nor shallow. The government rescue of the US financial industry pumped enough extra money into the economy and sufficiently reduced interest rates to give banks and the stock market the heavily hyped “recovery” that started March 2009 and is now over. What […]
