John Robertson writes in a guest column for Informed Comment CAN OBAMA PREVAIL AGAINST A ROMNEY-NETANYAHU TICKET? Paul Pillar and Leslie Gelb – both of them well-respected and largely mainstream commentators on US foreign policy – have recently published essays cautioning us all – and Mr. Obama especially – to step back, breathe deeply, ask […]
The Way Forward in the Middle East — Peled & Peled
Yoav Peled and Horit Herman Peled write in a guest column for Informed Comment The Way Forward in the Middle East Reversing a bi-partisan US policy in effect for the last two decades, the Republican National Committee recently endorsed the one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, resolving that “peace can be afforded the [Middle east] […]
Béji: “We are all Tunisian Jews”
Hélé Béji, a prominent woman writer from an old notable family in Tunis, was outraged by an incident in early January when a small crowd of religious extremists at the airport in Tunis to greet a visiting Hamas leader chanted “Death to the Jews.” She published this cry of the heart in Le Monde on […]
GOP Candidates Harm Israeli Security by Pushing for Impractical “Greater Israel”
The Republican candidates for president once again tried to out-do the Likud Party in their devotion to the doctrine of the Iron Wall and their attempt to erase the Palestinian people from history and justify their being kept in a condition of statelessness and lack of citizenship in any state. (The first thing the National […]
Egyptian Crowds in Tahrir Insist the Revolution will Continue
Perhaps 100,000 Egyptians came out on Wednesday in Tahrir Square in Cairo to mark the anniversary of the first massive protest that led to the overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak. There was also a huge crowd in Alexandria, Egypt’s second city. But the gathering was not simply a commemoration. The revolutionary youth used the occasion […]
SOTU and a Destabilized Middle East
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address treated the Middle East at several points, underlining the unusual importance of this region to the United States. Obama began by celebrating the end of the Iraq War and of the presence of US troops in that country. Although Obama might have been open to US forces […]
Graphic of World Military Spending (Iran’s too Small to Show up)
World military spending in 2010. Note that Iran’s is not a big enough proportion of world arms spending to show up on this graph, which doesn’t show countries that are lower than 2% of the global total. Courtesy Democratic Underground.
Mohamed Bouazizi (d. 2011) from Tunisia to San Francisco to SOTU
Graffiti from Mission Street, San Francisco in honor of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation kicked off the Tunisian Revolution, inspired the Tahrir Square demonstrations, and the Arab Spring: OWS San Francisco demonstration, California Street, January 20, 2012 (inspired by the Tahrir Square demonstrations of January 25, 2011, and after in Egypt): Occupy Wall Street in turn […]
Tomgram: William Astore, Confessions of a Recovering Weapons Addict
Perhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college…
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