Geography Archives: Lebanon

Sanctioning President Assad — what can it accomplish? Most importantly, it will help President Obama in his presidential campaign.  He can stand as someone who acts firmly against Arab dictators.  He killed Bin Laden and sanctioned Bashar al-Assad.  He takes decisive action and stands with the Arab street and for democracy.  This will serve him […]

May 18, 2011 In an effort to define the dominant narrative about the ongoing Arab awakening and America’s role in the Middle East, President Obama will give what the White House is billing as a major address on Middle East policy.  However eloquently delivered, the address will not be able to overcome or compensate for […]

The trajectory of the democratic movement in the Arab world was never going to be a straight line with clear goals and objectives.  The Arab regimes are not homogeneous; they have medieval Islamist monarchies, as in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, and secular but completely authoritarian regimes, both Western puppets like Mubarak and […]

Camille Otrakji is a Syrian political blogger based in Montreal.  Although he tends to keep a low profile, Otrakji has been, for the past several years, at the forefront of many of the most interesting and influential online initiatives relating to Syrian politics.  He is one of the authors and moderators at Joshua Landis’s Syria […]

  Two relationships have long been key to the stability of the Syrian regime.  The first is an economic relationship: the regime puts back into national production just enough to create jobs and produce cheap national goods to keep the working population in steady or, better yet improving, living conditions.  The second is a political […]

On April 9, Vittorio Arrigoni — Vik to us — wrote to me in an e-mail that “I will go out immediately after this shame” ends.  The “shame” was Israel’s latest flurry of F-16-delivered explosives that landed on the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. On April 14 at noon I learned of Vik’s abduction at […]

Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela.  His cartoons frequently appear in Aporrea and Rebelión among other sites.  Cf. “Lebanon: Saad Hariri Calls for Syrian Regime Change; Maybe Iran Too” (24 August 2006, leaked to WikiLeaks, published in Al-Akhbar); “Turkey Comments on Syrian Ihvan’s Meeting in Istanbul” (World Bulletin, 2 April 2011); المراقب العام للأخوان […]

  Following a general meeting that brought together representatives from various Palestinian and Lebanese civil society organizations as well as individual activists, the Organizing Committee of Maseerat al ‘Awda, the Return to Palestine March, has announced the launch of its preparatory activities. The “Return to Palestine March” will take participants to the border with Occupied […]

  ثـــــورة غضــــــب Never will we accept humiliation We are the lovers of martyrdom Raise your voice and say it loud My cause is my nation, and my blood my weapon! Never will we accept humiliation We are the lovers of martyrdom Raise your voice and say it loud My cause is my nation, and […]

We return from a recent trip to the region persuaded that the main question engaging people with respect to the “Arab spring” is no longer “who’s next,” but rather “how far will Saudi Arabia go in pushing a counter-revolutionary agenda” across the Middle East?  Whether Saudi Arabia is really capable of coping with the momentous […]

  Tuesday, April 12, 2011 Yassin Al-Hajj Saleh in the New York Times Of course, Saleh suffered from the brutality of the Syrian regime and I share many of his criticisms of the Syrian regime although I don’t share his decision to write about Syria in racist anti-Syrian (people) right-wing publications, like An-Nahar and Al-Hayat […]

A number of news reports by AFP, the Guardian, and other news agencies and outlets are suggesting that Syrian security forces were responsible for shooting nine Syrian soldiers, who were killed in Banyas on Sunday.  Some versions insist that they were shot for refusing orders to shoot at demonstrators. Considerable evidence suggests that this is […]

  Flynt Leverett, a professor of international affairs at Penn State and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial by Fire.  Andrew Tabler, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is the author of the forthcoming book In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness […]

Thousands of Lebanese took to the streets on Sunday to demand the abolition of the sect-based electoral system in Lebanon, according to which the key political offices are apportioned among religious communities. The demonstrators, starting from the national museum in Beirut, marched to the parliament.  They demanded the overturning of the sect-based system and democratic […]

The full extent of the ramifications of the extraordinary developments in Egypt since the beginning of this year — for Egypt itself, for the Middle East, and for the world — will not be clear for some time.  At this juncture, though, it seems virtually certain that post-Mubarak Egypt will have a much more balanced […]

Gilbert Achcar defends the recently “UN-authorized” imperialist intervention in Libya on the ground that general principles may require exceptions in concrete cases.  “Every general rule admits of exceptions.  This includes the general rule that UN-authorized military interventions by imperialist powers are purely reactionary ones, and can never achieve a humanitarian or positive purpose.”1  This kind […]

Paul Jay: The title of your upcoming book, Syria’s Democratic Experiment, first of all, what is the experiment?  And then talk a little about how we got there. Joshua Landis: Well, the book really deals with a period at the time of independence — 1946, ’45, ’46 — in Syria, when the French left and […]

With respect to international law, in what ways does this intervention in Libya differ from those carried out in Afghanistan and Iraq? The intervention in Afghanistan, despite protestations to the contrary, was not authorized by the Security Council, whose relevant resolutions did not even mention Afghanistan, let alone authorize “all necessary means.”  That was because […]

Could it be that Syrian refinery workers thought it wise to warn imperialists not to descend on Syria to liberate their oil and jobs from them in the name of liberating them from Bashar? — Ed. Tartous, Syria, 29 March 2011 Cf. “Syria is the only significant crude oil producing country in the Eastern Mediterranean […]

Bashar al-Assad is a lucky man.  Even the mother of the Angry Arab (himself no fan of the Syrian president) seems to like him: “As my mom says about him: he is the best educated among Arab leaders (many of whom are illiterate) and it shows.” — Ed. Beirut, Lebanon, 27.03.11 Cairo, Egypt, 31.03.11 Bucharest, […]