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 […]
Geography Archives: Iraq
United against Us, Divided among Themselves: Toronto and European Assault on Living Standards
Martin Wolf described it as “a bloodbath.” The Financial Times editorial called it a “chilling read.” Britain’s budget is one of austerity, the likes of which has not been seen in generations. A 25 per cent cut in public spending; a quarter of a million or more public sector jobs to be slashed. It […]
Climate Crisis: A Symptom of the Development Model of the World Capitalist System
Speech to the Panel on Structural Causes of Climate Change, World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 20, 2010 Good afternoon, compañero presidente Evo Morales, thank you for this initiative, for this invitation, and for your hospitality. Thanks to the people of Bolivia and the people […]
Expelling Palestinians from Jerusalem: The Case of Four Hamas Politicians
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 […]
Lieberman’s “Peace” Plan: Strip Palestinians of Citizenship
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 King Abdullah to Meet President Obama: Iran, Iraq, and Palestine on the Agenda
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 […]
Iraq
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 […]
Excerpt from “The Prophet and the Proletariat”
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 […]
Russia, Iran, and the United States
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 […]
The Green Movement Is Not the Future of Iran
Western analysts and policymakers need to rethink their basic calculations about the Islamic Republic’s domestic politics. This rethinking should start with a recognition that the Green movement is not the future of Iranian politics; in fact, it’s not even the future of what at least used to be called the “reform movement.” By sticking with […]
Brazil and Iran: Our Motives and the Bullying Trio
Despite what the experts of barefoot diplomacy1 never stop repeating, there is nothing even remotely anti-American in the Brazilian position on Iran: our motives, unlike those of the bullying trio (USA, France, United Kingdom), are clear, transparent and openly stated several times. We support the peaceful development of nuclear energy. We do not believe […]
About South of the Border
Listen to Amy Goodman’s interview with Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali: Oliver Stone: So, Chávez was sort of a natural [as a subject for his work] because he is such a demonized, polarizing figure, but when I met him, it was not at all what I thought, you know, what we made him out […]
Interview with Giovanni Arrighi (Berlin, 2005)
The interview with Giovanni Arrighi below was conducted on 12 November 2005, at the “Kapitalismus Reloaded” international conference held in Berlin. It is published in English here today to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Arrighi’s death. A. Fathollah-Nejad (AFN): Does the West have to fear China? G. Arrighi (GA): I don’t think so. I mean […]
Peter Erlinder Jailed by One of the Major Genocidaires of Our Era — Update1
The May 28 arrest of U.S. attorney and Chicago native Peter Erlinder by the Paul Kagame dictatorship in Rwanda reveals much about this regime that is routinely sanitized in establishment U.S. and Western media coverage and intellectual life. But if we use Erlinder’s arrest to call attention to some less-well-known facts, a much grimmer […]
The 4th UN Sanction Resolution against Iran: The End of “Tough Diplomacy”
Prior to the 2008 US presidential election, in an essay entitled “What the Future Has in Store for Iran,” I predicted that regardless of who is elected president, the US foreign policy toward Iran will be determined largely by Israel and its various lobby groups in the US, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee […]
The Other Fateful Triangle: Israel, Iran, and Turkey
The thunderous events set in motion by Israel’s storming of the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the peace flotilla challenging the blockade of Gaza, have thrown important light on the overall situation in the Middle East. Turkey has emerged as the major protagonist among the forces that support the Palestinian cause. This is extremely […]
Persistent (and Game-Changing) Myths: Iran’s 2009 Presidential Elections, One Year Later
Since manufactured claims about Iraqi WMD led the United States to invade Iraq in 2003, no analytic line about developments in the Middle East has had a bigger impact on American foreign policy than the assertion that the outcome of Iran’s June 12, 2009 presidential election — held one year ago tomorrow — was a […]
Obama’s Charade on Iran Sanctions
Today, the United Nations Security Council will adopt a new resolution imposing sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran over its nuclear activities. Predictably, the Obama Administration is working to spin its “victory” in New York as both a great diplomatic achievement and a serious intensification of international pressure on Iran over the nuclear issue. […]
Ikhras: Exposing House Arabs and House Muslims
Logo designed by Carlos Latuff About Ikhras “Ikhras” is classical Arabic for “Shut Up,” which is “Inchab” in Iraqi, “Sakkir Boozak” in Levantine Arabic, or “Intam” in the Arabian Peninsula. Ikhras was inspired by the Arab and Muslim “activists” and “representatives” that hijacked our identities and name for their own self-aggrandizement and in furtherance […]
The Real Strategic Challenge That Turkey and Iran Pose to Israel
As the interlinked dramas of Israel’s attack on Turkish civilian ships on the high seas and the Obama Administration’s push for a new Iran sanctions resolution in the Security Council play out, some in the American foreign policy establishment are beginning to realize that the Middle East — and America’s place in it — are […]
