Geography Archives: Iraq

Although it’s been over five years since the United States invaded Iraq, a few non-patriots among us refuse to understand or endorse our wartime zeitgeist.  I have, therefore, persuaded our noble, statuesque Icon of America to gas up her torch and shed some light on a few selfish queries posed by our huddled, recalcitrant masses. […]

Cos’è successo al movimento contro la guerra che esplose nel 2003 mobilitando milioni di persone in tutto il mondo occidentale, al punto da esser definito una volta dal New York Times come «la seconda superpotenza»?Il fatto è che esso non è mai stato un movimento vero e proprio ma solo lo spasmo di un giorno, […]

  28 March 2008 Basra Assault Confirms Presence of British Forces a Threat to Political and Trade Union Rights in Iraq In a series of telephone calls from Basra over the past 48 hours, Iraqi trade union activists appeal for solidarity and describe how the so-called ‘Security Plan’ started midnight 24 March with intense shelling […]

Christopher O’Brien.  Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World.  New Society Publishers (November 2006), 275 pages. Beer, like so many other products, is largely in the hands of giant corporations.  Therefore, drinking beer can often enrich the same systems of power we as activists are fighting against.  Fermenting Revolution: How To Drink […]

Unfortunately, influential American and Israeli opponents of Iran have been successful: using negative propaganda of the sort that claims that Iran has an intention to cause a nuclear holocaust and that a Third World War and “Islamic fascism” must be prevented, and tying the disaster of Iraq to Iran’s interference, they have turned Iran into […]

  Sociologist and historian at Yale University, Immanuel Wallerstein has described the globalization of capitalism, and today he criticizes Western “universalist” justifications of expansionism. In your book European Universalism, you revisit the 16th-century debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda on the American Indians.  In what respect does this debate seem to you particularly relevant to […]

March is a cruel month in the recent history of the Middle East.  This year is the fifth anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie who was crushed to death by an Israeli soldier driving an armored Caterpillar D9 bulldozer on March 16, 2003 as she attempted to stop the gigantic vehicle from destroying the […]

  March 20, 2008, destined to be another day of infamy.  On this date the US officially declared war on Iran.  But it’s not going to be the kind of war many have been expecting. No, there was no dramatic televised announcement by President George W. Bush from the White House oval office.  In fact […]

Is the Bush administration ramping up for an attack on Iran?  The signs seem to point in that direction.  On March 11, Navy Adm. William Fallon, commander of the U.S. forces in the Middle East, retired early because of differences with Washington on Iran policy.  And now, Dick Cheney’s current Middle East tour may be […]

March 19, 2003: a date that will live in infamy.  Perhaps not in the minds of many of our fellow citizens, but surely to most people around the world.  On that date, U.S. military forces invaded Iraq. Almost a year later I was in a small farming village some miles north of Baghdad, accompanying members […]

Reeling from the blow that it received in the aftermath of the Colombian military’s illegal incursion on March 1 into Ecuador — which resulted in the brutal massacre of a number of civilians and members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), including its chief negotiator Raul Reyes — US imperialism has once again […]

  As feminists and people of conscience, we call for solidarity with Palestinian women in Gaza suffering due to the escalating military attacks that Israel turned into an open war on civilians.  This war has targeted women and children, and all those who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, and are also denied […]

  Y’all remember five years ago?  Were any of you on the streets with Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW) in downtown San Francisco five years ago? I wasn’t.  I was not on the streets because I had a brand-new baby who needed to eat every two hours, so I couldn’t risk arrest.  I […]

If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s most intractable, much the same can be said of the parallel debate about whether its resolution can best be achieved by a single state embracing the two peoples living there or by a division of the land into two separate states, one for Jews and the […]

In November 2007, the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors reducing immigration, released a report entitled “Immigrants in the United States, 2007: A Profile of America’s Foreign-Born Population.”   The report was covered widely in the media, and the author, Center staff researcher Steven Camarota, was given many opportunities to repeat his […]

The world’s largest prison — Gaza prison with 1.5 million inmates, many of them starving, sick and penniless — is receiving more sympathy and protest by Israeli citizens, of widely impressive backgrounds, than is reported in the U.S. press. In contrast, the humanitarian crisis brought about by Israeli government blockades that prevent food, medicine, fuel […]

Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai’s much publicized remark last week about Gaza facing a “shoah” — the Hebrew word for the Holocaust — was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army’s plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip. More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing indication of the Israeli […]

The comic strip adventures of Mr. Block first appeared in 1912 in publications of the Industrial Workers of the World.  With his thick, cubic head, Mr. Block, the creation of IWW cartoonist Ernest Riebe, typified a classic type of US worker: scoffing at the idea of working-class solidarity, Mr. Block always sided with his employers […]

If there was a time when Iranian analysts and decision makers would question the benefits of continuing to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency, it would be now.  The IAEA has allowed systematic US intervention in Iran’s nuclear file, paving the way to a third round of sanctions against Iran’s nuclear programme.  But while […]

In the strange world of Israeli academia, an Arab college lecturer is being dismissed from his job because he refused to declare his “respect for the uniform of the Israeli army.”  The bizarre demand was made of Nizar Hassan, director of several award-winning films, after he criticized a Jewish student who arrived in his film […]