Geography Archives: Iraq

If former US president George W. Bush had tuned in to the English broadcast on Syrian TV on Saturday he would have clearly frowned at seeing Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri in Damascus, being greeted warmly as a guest of honour by Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. The footage would probably make him furious — […]

A fascinating social history of swimming pools in northern United States that was published in 2007 deserves attention from Iran researchers.  Contested Waters showed how, between the World Wars, middle class expansion/empowerment in general and eroticization/gender de-segregation at public pools popularized swim facilities that excluded African Americans.  Earlier in the century, women, not Blacks, had […]

We want to draw your attention to a brilliant piece, “Iran’s Foreign Policy Strategy After Saddam,” just published by Kayhan Barzegar, an Iranian scholar and foreign policy analyst currently at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.  We have previously posted about an Op Ed that Barzegar published on Iranian perspectives about […]

  But for Iran, the 6th Manama Dialogue would have failed to achieve its very objective, namely serving as a forum for debating regional security.  Held in Bahrain from 11 to 13 December, the occasion attracted Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki following a two-year absence from the annual event. Senior Iranian officials shunned the 2007 […]

The United States has already lost the war in Afghanistan, just as it has lost the war in Iraq. President Barack Obama’s vast expansion of the Afghan war announced Dec. 1, and the extension of the violence into neighboring Pakistan, are intended to camouflage the reality of defeat, as was the Bush Administration’s “surge” in […]

“Sanctions alone cannot eradicate apartheid; that task is ultimately left to the people of South Africa themselves.  But economic pressure and political isolation of the South African government can hasten the day when justice and freedom reign in that troubled land.” — Richard L. Trumka, June 23, 1987 “We call on other workers and unions […]

1. Where We Are: a) The world has entered a depression, whose greatest impact is yet to come (in the next five years). b) The United States has entered a serious decline in geopolitical power, whose greatest impact is yet to come (in the next five years). c) The world environment is entering into serious […]

  The talks between the G5 plus 1 and Iran are careening toward a premature breakdown.  If they do fall apart, it will be due in large part to a serious diplomatic miscalculation by the Obama administration. Along with its European allies, the Obama administration seized on a plan that cleverly asked Iran to divest […]

Take a look at the map.  Afghanistan is next to or near Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan, and India.  These are all countries that are vitally important to the United States as key allies or enemies, and as potential economic and political competitors.  Afghanistan is also next to Turkmenistan and other Central Asian Republics that are […]

  A young boy sits on rusted tank tracks in the desert bordering Iran and Iraq.  His head is bowed, and he’s sobbing.  A few yards away, a dozen bearded men gather around a Shiite cleric.  The men weep as the cleric recounts the story of a fearless martyr killed during the Iran-Iraq war.  He […]

On November 7, 2009, the Western media devoted ample space to the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez.  The news from Havana about the dispute between the dissident and Cuban authorities circled the world and overshadowed the rest of the news.1 Sanchez recounted her mishap in detail on her blog and in the press.  In doing so, […]

In Part 1 of this article we argued that Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou’s account of the foundation of Communist universalism in the event of Christianity signals a number of inconsistencies immanent to their respective ontologies (Coombs 2009).  For Žižek it appears difficult to reconcile his touted open interpretation of Hegel with the ontological significance […]

The original title for the article that follows was “Response to ‘Raoul Djukanovic’.”  “RD” is the Internet pseudonym of Daniel Simpson, who we mention in our second paragraph (below), and who, as a member of what we refer to as the Bosnia Genocide Lobby, assails us wherever we publish something related to the former Yugoslavia.  […]

  Human societies have created the bases of our survival, sustenance and advancement through the use of our natural resources in production with rudimentary tools and rising levels of science and technology.  Yet in no time in history has environmental destruction been systematically brought about in most parts of the world. The people of the […]

  Eric Davis.  Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.  397 pp.  $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-23546-5. This review has been a long time coming, but during this time, Davis’s book has become the subject of extensive comment, achieving an almost iconic, certainly landmark, status in […]

  Additional number of American troops President Obama plans to deploy to Afghanistan: 30,000 Total number of U.S. troops that will be there after the deployment: 98,000 Number of private contractors working for the U.S. in Afghanistan as of September 2009: 104,101 Percent by which that number grew between June and September: 40 Percent of […]

The mass slaughter of 57 civilians in Maguindanao, the Philippines, on November 23 by a local warlord may seem a minor incident compared with the much more heinous destruction of whole villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan by US drones.  In the Philippines, however, it acquires symbolic density by the resonance of contextual historic factors linked […]

Over 300 antiwar protesters took part in a demonstration at the gates to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point Dec. 1 as President Barack Obama sought to justify his decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Facing police and soldiers at the Highland Falls gate to the Academy, demonstrators repeatedly chanted, “30,000 more! […]

Military Families Speak Out, an organization of over 4,000 military families opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, issued the following statement in response to last night’s speech by President Obama regarding Afghanistan. President Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan by deploying another 30,000 troops has sent the message to military families […]

“The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of the ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.” — Karl Marx A few days back, I received a ‘Dear friends’ email from Mr. Najam Sethi, ex editor-in-chief of Daily Times, Pakistan, announcing that he, together with several of his […]