Middle East 4 ChangeIran nuclear deal: yet another failure
Saturday, July 9, 2022
Yassamine Mather The saga of the Iran nuclear deal continued last week – this time with a change of venue. After the failure of weeks of negotiations in…
Health system performance in Iran: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
GBD 2019 Iran Collaborators A report published in the medical Journal Lancet (April 6 2022) shows that sanctions imposed on Iran have had a major effect on population…
Russia-Ukraine war: US quest to preserve global hegemony could be its downfall
Saturday, June 4, 2022
Marco Carnelos When the doyen of foreign policy gurus, Henry Kissinger, is hinting that Ukraine should cede territory to Russia to help end the invasion, you know in…
A Bit of Hope That Doesn’t Come from Miami
Saturday, April 24, 2021
Vijay Prashad After twenty years, the United States government – and the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – will depart from Afghanistan. They said that…
Turkey at the Crossroad
Monday, April 5, 2021
Cihan Tuğal Ten years ago, Erdoğan’s Turkey was hailed in Washington as an example to the Muslim world—a free-market, pro-American Islamic democracy with high growth rates, renowned cultural…
US Drug Lobby try to prevent delivery of low-cost vaccines to poorer counties
Sunday, March 7, 2021
Lee Fang President Joe Biden’s administration is being asked to punish Hungary, Colombia, Chile, and other countries for seeking to ramp up the production of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics without…
Ending the Other War in Yemen
Sunday, February 14, 2021
Brian Terrell On February 4, in his first major foreign policy address, President Joe Biden announced “we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war…
After ISIS
Friday, February 5, 2021
Patrick Cockburn Alend Shoresh is a Kurdish farmer and teacher from north-east Syria who was conscripted into fighting Islamic State in 2018: he joined the Syrian Democratic Forces…
THE ANGRY ARAB: Machinations in the Gulf
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
As`ad AbuKhalil Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and now former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rushed to engineer various foreign policy initiatives in the very last stretch of…
Blips on the Screen: the drone as a weapon of war
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Andrew Cockburn The Drone Age: How Drone Technology Will Change War and Peace by Michael Boyle. Oxford, Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium by Thomas Stubblefield. California, The Kill Chain: Defending America…
Gangsterism as Foreign Policy: Assassinations are Becoming the New Norm
Thursday, December 10, 2020
Patrick Cockburn I was in Israel on 4 November 1995 when a student named Yigal Amir assassinated the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as he left a peace…
The Yemen Civil War Arms Bonanza
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
Binoy Kampmark “Making billions from arms exports which fuel the conflict while providing a small fraction of that in aid to Yemen is both immoral and incoherent.” So…
Some reflections on Occupied Iraq
Sunday, September 6, 2020
Mike Phipps I Introduction Iraq is back in the news again, partly due to the airing of a five-part BBC documentary. Once Upon a Time in Iraq has…
Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic, the U.S. War Machine Presses On
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Jeff Mackler That Russia paid the Taliban financial bounties to kill 18 U.S. and “coalition” soldiers in Afghanistan is in dispute to say the least. Both Democrats and…
Trump Authorized CIA To Wage Cyberwar On Iran And Others
Monday, July 20, 2020
Moon of Alabama Recently there have been a number of incidents in Iran where unexplained fires or explosion have destroyed some infrastructure: Since June, fires or explosions have…
COVID-19, Capitalist Crises, Class Resistance
Sunday, June 14, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic arrived at a moment of multiple crises of the capitalist system: capital accumulation, ecology, governance, and science. The uprising following the murder of George Floyd…
US imperialism, Zionist and the danger of war
Saturday, June 6, 2020
Mike Macnair, Moshé Machover, Yassamine Mather Crisis and need for conflict Mike Macnair What we are seeing today is a situation where the United States is lashing out…
Fundamentalist Pandemics: What Evangelicals Could Learn From The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
Juan Cole This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism — this time…
Iran coronavirus: US sanctions could turn crisis into catastrophe
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Nader Entessar & Kaveh Afrasiabi By all accounts, the outbreak of coronavirus in Iran poses a major existential threat that could overwhelm the healthcare system and other resources…
Backdrop & Reverberations of Soleimani’s Assassination (Part 2: Iraq, Syria, and Yemen)
Thursday, February 13, 2020
[On 3 January 2020, the United States assassinated Major General Qassem Soleimani of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Corps Guard (IRGC). The event was an escalation by the Trump Administration…
Blundering into War: What Trump doesn’t know about Iran
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Patrick Cockburn At the time of his assassination, General Qasem Soleimani’s strategy in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East with large Shia populations had become counterproductive. He is…
Trump Administration declares US an Occupying Power in Iraq
Monday, January 13, 2020
Juan Cole The Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdulmahdi late last week requested a meeting with the US government to plan out the departure of US troops, which has…
Trump Unites Iran and Iraq . . . against the United States
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Juan Cole As is always the way with Western colonialists, Trump administration figures such as secretary of state Mike Pompeo gave it out on Friday that the people…
A Lesson for the Palestinian Leadership
Friday, November 15, 2019
Ramzy Baroud The release on November 6 of two Jordanian nationals, Heba al-Labadi and Abdul Rahman Mi’ri from Israeli prisons was a bittersweet moment. The pair were finally…
Up In Smoke: The Neocon Assault on Syria Is Finally Over
Saturday, October 26, 2019
David Stockman By a vote of 354-60 last week the U.S. House of Representative proved that Imperial Washington is addicted to war, and that the level of ignorance,…
The U.S. Led Coup Attempt In Iraq May Further Weaken That Country
Tuesday, October 8, 2019
The current unrest in Iraq began a week ago after a prominent general was removed from his post: Lieutenant General Abdul Wahab al-Saadi was the great Iraqi military…
Kushner’s Threat to Palestine: An Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Norman Finkelstein and Colter Louwese. Norman Finkelstein is a leading authority on the Israel-Palestine conflict. While most observers have proclaimed Jared Kushner’s ongoing ‘peace’ initiative to be dead…
Persian Gulf: Tanker wars and propaganda
Monday, July 29, 2019
Yassamine Mather. The conflict between Iran and the United States is in its early stages, yet we are already witnessing war propaganda, and the presentation of outright lies…
It’s Trump Who Needs to be Deterred From War Not Iran
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Robert Fisk. It’s about time we wised up to what is going on in this utterly farcical “crisis” in the Gulf, this charade of lies and pomposity which…
Turkey’s Erdoğan: A vizier or a jester?
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Esen Uslu. The Turkish airforce base at Mürted near Ankara had an interesting history. The name means ‘renegade’, and it has been associated with the Battle of Ankara…