Geography Archives: Iraq

US workers’ real wages (money wages adjusted for the prices workers actually pay) have not risen from their levels in the 1970s.  Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirm that real wages continued to stagnate through 2009.  Across the same 30-year period, the productivity of labor kept rising: the average worker produced ever more output […]

  The Arab and Muslim world is indeed in crisis.  This crisis, however, may give us a new opportunity to reclaim our fate from foreign powers, local autocrats, and religious fanatics.  To do so, we can benefit from recuperating the best elements from our great tradition of Arab nationalism. Under the banner of “Arab nationalism,” […]

  Beirut has been labelled the Paris, sometimes the Switzerland, of the Middle East.  According to one recent New York Times article, it is now the region’s Provincetown (the Cape Cod resort favoured by gay visitors).  This ever-changing city seems to have become a mirror where people project their own fantasies. Comparing Beirut with another […]

As the peace movement digs in for long-haul opposition to continuing U.S. wars, we simultaneously face urgent immediate challenges.  Policy fights that may well determine Washington’s course for many years ahead regarding Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, and Honduras (and Latin America in general) are at important junctures.  It will take more noise — in the streets and […]

Americans are famous for not paying much attention to the rest of the world, and it is often said that foreign wars are the way that we learn geography.  But most often it is not the people who have little direct experience outside their own country that are the problem, but rather the experts. The […]

  Nahid Ghobadi has directed five short films (Closed Circle, First Journey, Build Our Homeland, Last Fever, and A Simple Excuse for Happiness).  She was Script Supervisor of Turtles Can Fly, Assistant Director of Marooned in Iraq, and Co-editor of Half Moon.  She is also a published poet.  This film, released in 2008, was written, […]

An early morning flight to D.C., day-long conference and empty cityscape drained me of energy. Exhausted, I stepped out of my nondescript hotel into the street and felt a heavy air pregnant with moisture.  Heading down the sidewalk to find dinner, I came across the shadow of a man who had the unmistakable gait of […]

It was just a matter of time before members of the collapsing left enlisted in the imperial attack on the most fundamental principles of the UN Charter, and added their voices to the growing chorus of support for Western power-projection under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).  But this […]

Tariq Ramadan just got purged from not only his position as “integration advisor” to the city of Rotterdam but also his visiting professorship at Erasmus University. — Ed. An Open Letter to My Detractors in the Netherlands Tuesday 18 August 2009 Once again I have come under attack in the Netherlands.  Last May and June, […]

  Shahram Akbarzadeh, Benjamin MacQueen, eds.  Islam and Human Rights in Practice: Perspectives across the Ummah.  London: Routledge, 2008.  x + 176 pp.  $140.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-44959-5. Islam and Human Rights in Practice: Perspectives across the Ummah addresses a vexing theoretical issue: can contemporary human rights practically inform normative and political structures in the Muslim […]

Doris “Dobby” Brin Walker, the first woman president of the National Lawyers Guild, died on August 13 at the age of 90.  Doris was a brilliant lawyer and a tenacious defender of human rights.  The only woman in her University of California Berkeley law school class, Doris defied the odds throughout her life, achieving significant […]

John Bellamy Foster.  The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.  328 pp. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously urged the world’s workers to unite because they had a world to win, and nothing to lose but their chains.  Today, the reality of climate change and worsening environmental breakdowns […]

  On Tuesday, July 21st, the United Nations Development Program launched its 5th Arab Human Development Report (AHDR).  The independently prepared report was not presented to the public prior to its publication, but criticism began to surface even before it was released, both from researchers involved in the report and from observers. Wujohat Nazar (Perspectives) […]

Every week, Marcia Carroll collects examples of privatization (that is, corporatization of the peoples’ assets).  Looking at her website, Privatizationwatch.org, will either make you laugh helplessly or make your blood boil. The “off the wall” giveaways at bargain-basement prices of what you and other Americans own eclipses imagination.  The latest escapes from responsible government are […]

  Iran, a major oil producing and exporting country, also imports gasoline because of inadequate refining capacity and rising petrol consumption.  This article examines the problems faced by an economy dependent on the export of crude oil and gas that are compounded by the dilemmas of rising domestic consumption, a significant decline in productive capacity, […]

In a recent congressional hearing, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman called the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act “a sword of Damocles over the Iranians” that will soon come down if President Obama’s diplomatic overture did not show signs of success by the fall. That sword is no mere metaphor and might kill more […]

In serious contention for Dumbest Washington Consensus for September is the idea of cutting off Iran’s gas imports to pressure Iran to stop enriching uranium.  A majority of Representatives and Senators have signed on to legislation that seeks to block Iran’s gas imports, a top legislative priority for the so-called “Israel Lobby.”  But it’s a […]

Address to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, the United Nations, New York,  23 July 2009 The phrase, responsibility to protect, brings to my mind painful memories of lack of protection of many people who died of ethnic cleansing in Kenya earlier this year.  The incidents of ethnic cleansing […]

Address to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, the United Nations, New York,  23 July 2009 The discussions about Responsibility to Protect (R2P), or its cousin “humanitarian intervention,” are regularly disturbed by the rattling of a skeleton in the closet: history, to the present moment. Throughout history, there have […]

The Campaign for Peace and Democracy1 has chosen to interpret our “Riding the ‘Green Wave’” article2 as a “vitriolic and dishonest attack” on its authors, and an “offensive impugning of [their] integrity.”  In fact, it is nothing of the sort.  Instead, it is concerned with issues of central importance to the left in the United […]