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…
Will October Surprise Be Trump-Provoked War With Iran?
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Bob Dreyfuss Was Donald Trump’s January 3rd drone assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani the first step in turning the simmering Cold War between the United States and…
War and Pandemic Journalism: the Truth Can Disappear Fast
Sunday, August 9, 2020
Patrick Cockburn The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war. Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle against the…
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…
Victim of Zionist colonisation: Book Review
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Moshé Machover Rashid Khalidi ‘The hundred-years war on Palestine: a history of settler-colonial conquest and resistance’ Profile Books, 2020, pp336, £17.99 As part of their professional training, historians…
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…
A lesson from Idlib for Hezbollah: is Israel preparing an attack?
Friday, March 13, 2020
Elija J Magnier For the first time in its official existence in 1985, Lebanon’s Hezbollah has now clashed on the battlefield with the Turkish army, one of NATO’s…
Turkey’s Failed Gamble in Syria
Thursday, March 12, 2020
Conn Hallinan Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s latest gamble in Syria’s civil war appears to have come up snake eyes. Instead of halting the Damascus government’s siege of…
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…
Can the U.S. and Iran Avoid a Disastrous Collision?
Sunday, February 9, 2020
Prabir Purkayastha With the United States walking out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—more commonly known as the Iran accord—we all enter into a heightened zone…
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…
The Embalming of Syria
Thursday, January 16, 2020
Edward Hunt The Syrian civil war, which has been raging since 2011, is one of the worst tragedies of the early twenty-first century. Approximately half a million people…
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…
For a workers movement to stop US war on Iran
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Oakland Socialist The best – the only – way to build a successful movement against a US war on Iran is to build a workers movement that includes…
Iraq’s Worst Fears Have Come True: a Proxy War on Its Doorstep
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
Patrick Cockburn Iraqis have a well-honed instinct about approaching danger which stems from their grim experience during 40 years of crisis and war. Three months ago, I asked…
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…
Iran’s Military Strategy
Sunday, December 29, 2019
Hadi Ajili and Mahsa Rouhi On 20 June 2019, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) shot down a United States RQ-4A Global Hawk BAMS-D surveillance drone over the…
When You Follow the Gun Trail, You Can End Up in Expected Places
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Robert Fisk I’ve always wanted to find out where the guns came from. Who were the ‘willing accomplices’ to the wars I witnessed? In 1996, I traced to…
Erdogan’s Ethnic Cleansing of the Kurds is Still Happening
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Patrick Cockburn Mass expulsion or the physical extermination of an entire ethnic or religious community – ethnic cleansing – is usually treated by the media in one of…
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 Wounds of War
Thursday, October 17, 2019
Kathy Kelly Its economy gutted by war, Afghanistan’s largest cash crop remains opium. Yet farmers there do grow other crops for export. Villagers in the Wazir Tangi area…
No to the invasion and occupation of northeastern Syria by the Turkish army
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
The Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists condemn Turkeys invasion of Northeastern Syria and its deadly assault on the Kurds. Last week, after U.S. president Trump…
Erdoğan gets green light
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Esen Uslu The months-long bargaining for a tit-for-tat deal with Turkey has eventually reached its culmination, with Donald Trump withdrawing his token forces from the Turkish-Syrian border area….
A Year After Khashoggi’s Murder, Saudi Arabia is Lurching Toward Chaos
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Robert Fisk The Saudis are taking a pasting. Video pictures from the Houthis of Saudi soldiers and their allies killed or surrendering inside the Saudi border town of…
Three Saudi Brigades Annihilated in Devastating Houthi Offensive in Saudi Arabia
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Federico Pieraccini Many may have hitherto been led to believe that the Houthis were a ragtag armed force lacking in sophistication. Many, seeing the drone and missile attacks…
A Bold Reconceptualization of the Compulsory 1923 Greco-Turkish Exchange of Populations
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Elektra Kostopoulou. Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. by Aslı Iğsız. Stanford University Press 2018. At the start of 2019, almost eighty million people…
Yemen: The Deeper Meaning in a Lost War
Thursday, September 5, 2019
Alastair Crooke. It’s pretty clear. Saudi Arabia has lost, and, notes Bruce Riedel, “the Houthis and Iran are the strategic winners”. Saudi proxies in Aden – the seat…
The Fighting Dramatically Escalates As Both Sides Prepare For “The Final War” Between Israel And Iran
Sunday, September 1, 2019
Michael Snyder Are we about to see World War 3 erupt in the Middle East? Over the past several days, Israel has attempted to prevent attacks by Iranian…
Long Range Attack On Saudi Oil Field Ends War On Yemen
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Today Saudi Arabia finally lost the war on Yemen. It has no defenses against new weapons the Houthis in Yemen acquired. These weapons threaten the Saudis economic lifelines….
Rattling the Nuclear Cage: India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran and the US
Monday, August 19, 2019
Robert Fisk. We like our anniversaries in blocks of 50 or 100 – at a push we’ll tolerate a 25. The 100th anniversary of the Somme (2016), the 75th anniversary of…