Geography Archives: Middle East

Elections are supposed to solve problems by reordering government, adopting new policies, and putting new people in control. But how many elections must Israel have before it realizes it can do none of those things because it’s caught in an intractable constitutional bind?

Lebanon’s state prosecutor suspended an order on Thursday to freeze the assets of 20 local banks, warning it would plunge the country and its financial sector into chaos, according to a copy of the decision seen by Reuters.

To me, the Lebanese crisis looks like, in the first instance, as a foreign exchange and international transactions crisis, a classic developing country crisis in the era of financialisation. As such it is closely connected to the country’s policy on the exchange rate. The fixed peg policy chosen by the Lebanese ruling class and operated by the central bank and the government for a long time, has proven destructive. The country’s economy is under great pressure because the strong pound has damaged Lebanese competitiveness on an international scale and facilitated the growth of domestic credit.

The U.S.-Taliban peace agreement signed in Doha on February 29 must be put in proper perspective. Indeed, there can’t be two opinions that the curtain is coming down on what U.S. President Donald Trump called the “endless war” in which America squandered away over a trillion dollars and lost thousands of lives with no victory in sight. Equally, without a doubt, this is the finest hour of Pakistan’s statecraft since the country’s creation in 1947.

The Saudi-UAE war on Yemen has been going on for five years. Despite recent peace talks leading to an improvement in aid distribution, the violence has escalated in certain key districts of Yemen over the past two weeks. Since January, 35,000 Yemenis have been displaced from their homes, an indicator of the dangerous situation in the country.

Neither the Indian political leadership nor the “deep state” seems to grasp that the geopolitics of the South Asian region is transforming with far-reaching consequences.

The protest movement in Iraq, which is now entering its fourth month, has come to be the principal instrument for Washington to surreptitiously advance the broader geopolitical confrontation with Iran that is being played out within the country.

Ghassan Salamé is the head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya. He took over this job in 2017, six years after the catastrophic NATO war on Libya. What Salamé inherited was a country torn into shreds, two governments in place—one in Tripoli and one in Tobruk—and one civil war that had too many factions to name.

The Pentagon deployed a new, smaller nuclear warhead aboard the ballistic missile submarine USS Tennessee as it sailed into the Atlantic last month in the midst of the spiraling crisis with Iran. The weapon, known as the W76-2 warhead, has an explosive yield of roughly five kilotons, a third of the destructive power of the “Little Boy” bomb that claimed the lives of some 140,000 people in Hiroshima in 1945.

Guerin had dared, unlike any of her colleagues in the western media, to allude to the terrible price inflicted on the Palestinian people by the west’s decision to help the Zionist movement create a Jewish state shortly after the Holocaust. The Palestinians were dispossessed of their homeland as apparent compensation–at least for those Jews who became citizens of Israel–for Europe’s genocidal crimes.

Palestinians have responded to US President Donald Trump’s peace plan with a resounding “no,” expressing their frustrations with what they have dubbed as the “fraud of the century.” From social media to the streets, Palestinians in the occupied territory and in the diaspora have rejected Trump’s vision for the region, criticizing the plan for granting […]

The U.S.’s campaign against Iran has violated the most critical lessons that U.S. and UN officials claimed to have learned from the debacle in Iraq.

The departure of the former Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani is beginning to be felt in Iraq.

In testimony before the United Nations Security Council, former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert Ian Henderson stated that their investigation in Douma, Syria suggested no chemical attack took place. But their findings were suppressed.

On 17 January, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led the Friday prayers for the first time in eight years. He mocked the ‘American clowns’ who threatened Iran and said that Iran’s response to the U.S. assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani was a ‘slap in the face’ of U.S. power.

Today the cow is dry. Businessmen stepped on her neck for years, extracting the last drop of milk. There is nothing left for them to fight for, except for the hopes of using us to beg either from the U.S., the E.U. or the Gulf States.

Troop movements today promise anything but peace. Every two years military maneuvers encircle Russian borders; every nine months a new brigade of 4500 U.S. soldiers was flown over to “gain experience”. This year it will be a division of 20,000, joined by soldiers from 18 countries, 37,000 in all.

On January 5, Iran made a major announcement regarding its nuclear program, stating that it will no longer observe limits on the number of centrifuges that it uses to enrich uranium. While the announcement is significant, it was not altogether unexpected. And it most certainly does not constitute the “harsh revenge” that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised following the killing of Qasem Soleimani last week.

U.S. measures are the most punitive of overlapping sanctions regimes also applied by the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia and others. The U.S., in the words of a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, is waging “economic war” to “strangle to death” Assad’s government. The casualties are the poor, the sick and children—not the political and business elite.

The contradictions between imperialist actions and the legal standards they create can do much to raise mass consciousness and accelerate revolutionary momentum. But this can happen only if people know what the law is in the first place. Imperialists have been vigilant in their efforts to obscure and distort legal standards. We must be just as vigilant in ensuring clarity.