Geography Archives: Iraq

  • Will We Use the Power We Have on September 24?

    All last week I had a rare opportunity — to join several impressive speakers on the “Bring Them Home Now” tour’s northern route.  Al Zappala, whose son was killed in Iraq last year; Tammara Rosenleaf, whose husband is due to deploy to Iraq this fall; Stacy Bannerman, whose husband has already served a tour in […]

  • Lords of War: Arming the World

    “I hope they kill each other . . . too bad they both can’t lose.” — Nobel laureate Henry Kissinger (on the U.S. arming both sides of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s) “Do not support dictators. Do not sell them weapons.” — Nobel laureate Jose Ramos Horta, East Timorese peace negotiator It’s not every […]

  • Saving the Future

    Though in my university days I was no more of a party person than I am now, I had friends with other tastes. Visiting one on a morning many years ago, I found him blearily looking for traces of furniture amid the mess he and some others had generated through a long night. “I feel […]

  • US Labor Leaders:

    As one considers developments in and around the main currents of the US labor movement — the recent split in the AFL-CIO, and the reaction of both sides of the split to the ongoing strike by AMFA against Northwest Airlines, most particularly — it is difficult not to get discouraged by lack of leadership. Let […]

  • New Orleans:

      The world watched as people of New Orleans were herded into the Superdome, only to find themselves in a wretched and unsanitary place with no food, water, or proper medical care. Those in areas of high flooding fled to their rooftops, begging rescue helicopters to airlift them to safety. Many died trapped in their […]

  • “We Went into the Mall and Began ‘Looting'”: A Letter on Race, Class, and Surviving the Hurricane

      [Peter Berkowitz is a long-time Monthly Review subscriber. He was in New Orleans bringing his son Ernesto to begin his freshman year at Loyola when they were caught in the hurricane. Peter and Ernesto spent five days on the street by the Convention Center. Below is a letter Peter sent to his mother upon […]

  • Waiting for the Outside World

    In the “old days” of the U.S. peace movement, when many people focused on the threat of a global nuclear “exchange,” an organization called Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) foretold what would happen if a major American city was actually blasted by an atomic bomb. Horrific scenarios extended far beyond the numbers of dead and […]

  • Tributes to David Houston

    David Houston changed my life.  If it weren’t for Dave, I wouldn’t be a political economist, a political activist, and I wouldn’t have a sense of my life as part of a larger historical struggle for economic and social justice. Dave, along with his friend David Bramhall who concentrated on teaching undergraduates, were the sole […]

  • A Child’s Primer of Intelligent Design

    See the Bible. The Bible is a textbook. It is all you will ever need to know about anthropology, zoology, astronomy, psychology, or nuclear fission. Why is the Bible all you need to know? Because President George W. Bush said that the theory of “Intelligent Design” should be taught along with the Darwinian theory of […]

  • Iraq, Palestine, and Resisting Erasure

    [What follows is a talk Rela Mazali presented at the panel on “Linking Local with International Issues: Future Plans and Strategies for Struggle” at the International Women in Black Conference, East Jerusalem, 11-16 August 2005.] I’d like to read you something. This is part of a declaration: There is widespread opposition to the occupation. Political, […]

  • The Medicaid Kill-Off

    President George W. Bush and Congress slashed $10 billion from the Medicaid budget for this coming year. Medicaid is the primary public health care program for impoverished persons that serves over 53 million people. The cut is clearly an attack on poor people, and it may wind up killing disabled and chronically ill persons before […]

  • Koizumi Goes Postal

    On Monday, August 8th, Japan’s upper house of Parliament unexpectedly joined the French and Dutch electorates to give a sharp slap to neoliberal inevitability. Much to the totally delicious distress of all the usual suspects, from the Financial Times to the Christian Science Monitor, the parliamentarians turned down Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s key piece of […]

  • Japan’s Modern Historical Loop

    The news of world affairs these days is highly unlikely to delight the Japanese survivors of the two nuclear terrorist attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States’ armed forces sixty years ago. Those attacks were not meant to convince the Japanese leaders to surrender, something which they were about to do anyway, but […]

  • Superman and a New Progressive Strategy!

    When I was a child, I used to watch cartoons at home after school (I understand there is a debate about the wisdom of letting children watch TV.  However, I am doing fine today). My favorite cartoon was Superman.  Let me clarify. It was a little confusing watching Superman growing up in Puerto Rico.  Although […]

  • Tipping Friedman

    New York Times Op-Ed columnist Thomas Friedman is lucky I don’t have his phone number. If I did, I would call and tell him that the “tipping points” in the Middle East never tipped. The Bush administration presented a well-scripted farce to its consummate lapdogs in the media; and Friedman, along with his more conservative […]

  • What One Mom Has to Say to George Bush

    “That lying bastard, George Bush, is taking a five-week vacation in time of war,” Cindy Sheehan told 200 cheering members of Veterans for Peace at their annual convention in Dallas last Friday evening. She then announced she would go to Bush’s vacation home in nearby Crawford, Texas and camp out until he “tells me why […]

  • Waiting for Karl Rove

    Hi, I’m a mainstream pundit. You may remember me from such commentaries as “The GOP and Its Acronym” and “Why Must the Poor Have Such Bad Taste in Clothes?” As a pundit, one of my duties is to impart to you my sense of stylish pique concerning the war in Iraq. The war, when you […]

  • A “Better Occupation” of Iraq?

    It would be a mistake to say that it was inevitable that the US would fail in its putative mission of “liberating” Iraq or transforming it into a viable democracy, for that would be deterministic.  It would not be incorrect to state that it was practically inevitable, however.  And why that is so tells us […]

  • Distilling the 2005 AFL-CIO Convention: Disaster Ahoy!

    The Convention is over, delegates have returned home, and it’s time to make sense of the mess. First of all, the “Change to Win” Coalition’s boycott of the convention and split from the AFL-CIO was stupid. Workers are going to suffer for this stupidity for a while, at least. And they are going to suffer […]

  • A House Divided: For Better or Worse?

    Note: this concluding report on the AFL-CIO Convention and events surrounding it will be offered in two parts.  First, a summary and catch-up on certain events and impressions of the week in Chicago; second, an attempt to sort out and analyze these events, what they represent in a larger context, and what it all could […]