Geography Archives: Iraq

On July 23, a debate concerning the Responsibility to Protect took place in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations.  The responsibility to protect (R2P) is a notion agreed to by world leaders in 2005 that holds States responsible for shielding their own populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and related crimes […]

We are a group of university educators and antiwar activists with diverse political views who are based in Europe and North America.  During the past few years we have been active in defending Iran’s national rights — particularly those relating to the peaceful use of nuclear energy — against the pervasive deception created by western […]

  In the 1970s, when Iran’s Fedayeen and Mojahedin1 groups were engaged in an urban guerrilla struggle against the former Shah’s dictatorial regime, a faction of the Iranian Student Association (ISA) in the United States called Ehyaa2 had managed to convince some in the US Left, in particular America’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), that a […]

  Ana S. Trbovich.   A Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration.   Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.  xiv + 522 pp.  $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-533343-5. Ana S. Trbovich’s A Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration is a valuable intervention in the long running and, at times, torturous debate over the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.  The […]

  Play now: Patrick Cockburn: I think the government would have liked to have done it earlier, but the Mojahedin-e Khalq, these dissidents, were protected by the Americans in Iraq really since 2003 because the Americans, one way or another, saw them as an ally against the Iranian government. Marco Chown Oved: And does this […]

Iranians are writing their history.  The pen of the revolutionaries of the 1970s has been supplemented by the keyboard of a new generation.  Ayatollah Khomeini’s supporters perfected clandestine pamphleteering and the distribution of audio cassettes to subvert the regime of the shah; today’s activists use Facebook and Twitter to get their message across.  This is […]

There are many problems with the Campaign for Peace and Democracy’s “Question & Answer on the Iran Crisis,” issued by the CPD on July 7, and widely circulated since then.1 The CPD adopted this format, it tells us, because “some on the left, and others as well, have questioned the legitimacy of and the need […]

  From Nawal el Saadawi to Janet Afary Dear Janet, I am glad to see you’ve been reading my work since you were a graduate student.  Did you read my work in English or Persian?  (I write in Arabic.)  I very much enjoyed your book: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran.  Egypt, my country, and Iran […]

15 July 2009 The Department of State had prior knowledge of the coup. The Department of State and the US Congress funded and advised the actors and organizations in Honduras that participated in the coup. The Pentagon trained, schooled, commanded, funded, and armed the Honduran armed forces that perpetrated the coup and that continue to […]

Abdelwahab El-Affendi is a well-known Islamic scholar and political philosopher from Sudan, presently based in London.  Author of numerous works, his latest book, provocatively titled Who Needs an Islamic State? discusses what he regards as the serious lacunae in contemporary Islamist political thought, which, in his view, have caused Islamist movements to reach a virtual […]

These protesters that the Associated Press chose to label just “Iranian-Americans” (see below) are the Mojahedin (one of whose front groups the “National Coalition of Pro-Democracy Advocates” is as you can plainly see from its Web site promoting the cause of “Iranian Opposition Members in Camp Ashraf, Iraq“), Republicans, and their “useful idiots” who have […]

  The exit from the systemic crisis of capitalism needs to be political, and “a socialist project can mature in this turbulence.”  So says the Argentine economist, philosopher, and sociologist Claudio Katz, who also warns that the “global economic situation is very serious and is going to have to hit bottom, and now we are […]

The “Iranian people” have not spoken. What’s happening in Iran today is a developing conflict between two forces that each represent millions of people.  There are good people on both sides and the issues are complicated.  So before U.S. progressives decide to weigh in, supporting one side and condemning the other, let’s take a little […]

  The US war machine continues to inflict untold miseries on the people of the world and particularly those of the Muslim faith.  Barack Obama, the first black president in the history of the United States, has repeatedly promised to repair some of the damage wreaked by his predecessor on the international stage.  But the […]

  The military coup currently underway in Honduras is a hard coup accompanied by various vain attempts to make it appear soft and “constitutionalist.”  Behind the coup are diverse social, economic, and political forces, of which the most important is the administration of President Barack Obama.  No important change can happen in Honduras without Washington’s […]

There is a difference between the outlook of a secular generation of Iranian youth, yearning for a life in which religion (in the form of a clergy directing a theological state) refrains from meddling in their personal lives and individual fates as citizens, and the foreign and domestic policy considerations of the reformist trend.  A […]

Nations that chart a self-defining course, seeking to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets as they see fit, free from the smothering embrace of the US corporate global order, frequently become a target of defamation.  Their leaders often have their moral sanity called into question by US officials and US media, as has […]

The five senators voting against $106 billion for Obama’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were three reactionaries — Coburn (R-OK), DeMint (R-SC), and Enzi (R-WY) — and only two progressives Feingold (D-WI) and Sanders (I-VT). Not voting were two sick senators, Byrd (D-WV) and Kennedy (D-MA), and one just disgraced one — Ensign (R-NV). A […]

(This missive is directed at the non-Iranian “peace organizations” who are presently issuing “statements” on the Iran events for whatever organizational purposes they have in mind.  It is not at all intended to be critical of most of the excellent analysis and information exchange occurring, particularly within the Iranian communities.) We Americans love to shoot […]

Barack Obama’s Cairo speech heralds a shift from the Islamophobic rhetoric of the Bush regime, but not from the long-term aims of the U.S. empire. Predictably, Barak Obama’s speech in Cairo came under hysterical criticism from the right.  Sean Hannity screamed that Obama gave “sympathizers of 9/11” a voice on the world stage, Charles Krauthammer […]