Geography Archives: Saudi Arabia

  INTRODUCTION Five years into the US-UK illegal invasion of Iraq and its consequent catastrophe for Iraqi people, peace loving people throughout the world are appalled by the current Iran-US standoff and its resemblance to the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.  The hawks, headed by Dick Cheney in Washington, are now shamelessly calling for […]

Everything Americans do requires transportation because our individualized homes, like our jobs and shopping locations, are all considerable distances from one another except in our largest, densest cities.  The private automobile rules.  Everything we buy in a store got there by truck.  Two-thirds of US oil consumption goes for transportation, most of that for private […]

The Democrats and Republicans are united in the belief that Iran poses a risk to US interests in the Middle East and must therefore be reined in.  Iran is too irrational to be trusted with nuclear weapons, cry the warmongers who only half a century ago dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Iran is […]

Foreign countries are awash in dollars because they sell so much more to the US than they buy.  Increasingly, their governments use some of those dollars to establish and operate investment funds.  The funds buy shares in companies around the world.  Sometimes they buy companies directly.  Called “sovereign investment funds,” the IMF estimates that they […]

The Fairmont Conference In late September 1995, five hundred of the world’s economic and political leaders met in San Francisco’s prestigious Fairmont Hotel upon the invitation of an institution headed by Mikhail Gorbachev.  The conference was financed by some American super-rich, possibly in gratitude to Gorbachev’s “services rendered” in the ex-Soviet Union.  The task required […]

L’Irak a créé la surprise, dimanche 29 juillet, en battant l’Arabie Saoudite 1-0 en finale de la Coupe d’Asie de football, à Djakarta. Le capitaine de l’équipe, Younis Mahmoud, a inscrit le but de la victoire à la 71e minute pour offrir à l’Irak un succès inespéré.  C’est la première fois que l’Irak, véritable sensation […]

George Galloway gets suspended from the Commons even as the investigation into the Al-Yamamah deal (which may implicate the UK government in Saudi money laundering for terrorist cells: Simon Jenkins, “Who Exposed This Colossal Bribery? Why, the Feral Beast,” Guardian, 13 June 2007) gets scrapped.  Galloway notes: “The Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAe was […]

  Turkey — We landed in Istanbul May 16 for work and to visit family and friends.  We traveled to Ankara, then went southeast to villages near Kayseri, then back to Istanbul for an international anthropology conference before visiting the port city of Izmir for a few days, traveling inland again to the textile center […]

WCP leader Maryam Kousha addresses protesters in London in 2005.  Also pictured is Peter Tatchell. It is a sad day when self-described progressive gay rights defenders risk their credibility to promote the agendas of Middle Eastern fanatics.  Yet that was just the scenario when Doug Ireland and Peter Tatchell broke with several reputable rights groups […]

For the first time since its rise as a superpower the United States is facing a serious threat to its hegemony across the globe. In February this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed a security conference in Munich that had 250 of the world’s top leaders and officials in attendance, including such luminaries as the […]

Local 2627, DC 37, AFSCME interviews labor leader Houzan Mahmoud. This interview was conducted on March 5, 2007, at an event sponsored by the Center for Study of Working Class Life and cosponsored by U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW).  Houzan Mahmoud is the international representative of the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in […]

Raising the minimum wage and increasing the level of social assistance is a component part of challenging the large, low-wage multinationals that make up the vast majority employers of the working poor.  The largest of them all is Wal-Mart. For socialists, Wal-Mart is more than just a series of big retail stores that threaten our […]

  I have been very puzzled by how many on the left and in the liberal media seem to imagine that the situation in Iraq and the Middle East is bad for the Imperialists.  They are having a heyday with the so-called WOT. . . . It is going very well for them . . […]

Le 25 janvier 2007 se tenait, à Paris, la Conférence internationale de soutien au Liban, dite « Paris III », convoquée et présidée par Jacques Chirac. Etaient réunis les représentants de trente-six pays, notamment la secrétaire d’Etat américaine Condolezza Rice, et de quatorze institutions internationales dont le nouveau secrétaire général des Nations Unies Ban Ki-Moon, […]

“Un esercito segreto contro di noi ma gli sciiti sapranno resistere” BAGDAD – Si sente braccato e si nasconde.  Non dorme mai più di una notte nello stesso letto.  Qualcuno dei suoi fedelissimi gli ha già voltato le spalle.  Ha perfino trasferito la famiglia in un luogo segreto.  Moqtada al Sadr sente che la fine […]

The war that Western powers — primarily US, Israel and Britain — began against the Islamic world after September 11, 2001 is about to enter a new more dangerous phase as their early plans for “changing the map of the Middle East” have begun to unravel with unintended consequences. Codenamed “the war against terror,” the […]

Critical students of ethnically coded nationalism would agree: propagating the glory of “our” race or culture almost always entails the suppression of equal status for the race or culture that is represented as its other.  West Asia is no exception.  Iranian and Arab identity politics thwarted, perverted, and dismembered communitarian thinking for long periods in […]

  “The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’  But . . . the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” — Martin Luther King, Jr.1 “The truth […]

  The bus rumbled along a highway in southwest Iran, passing a series of anti-aircraft batteries and rickety guard towers before pulling in through a checkpoint to the Bushehr nuclear plant compound.  Having anticipated significant difficulties finding, much less nearing, the reactor, I stared in stunned silence at its dome.  So much for state secrets.  […]

I. Three Metropoles, Four Peripheries Many of us on the Left have pondered what would replace the Cold War division of the planet into the First, Second, and Third World.  Though the three worlds thesis was arbitrary at best — the social divisions within nation-states are often more significant than the distinctions between nation-states — […]