By Jan Oberg January 19, 2018 Most media covering the speech that US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, gave at the Hoover Institution on January 17, 2018 merely points out that he said that the United States would stay in Syria – open-ended – in the future and until President Bashar al-Assad has left the […]
By Jan Oberg You’ve heard it for years: Iran is a military threat to Europe, to the world – because it wants to acquire nuclear weapons – to the US and its allies in the Middle East. It takes shrewd steps to become a hegemon through de-stabilising policies all around and by supporting terrorism everywhere. […]
By Mike Whitney January 16, 2018 The Trump administration has settled on a plan for sabotaging the Iranian Nuclear deal that does not explicitly violate the terms of the agreement. Trump will continue to suspend sanctions, as is required under the terms of the deal, but at the same time, he will warn that […]
By Graham Fuller • With the emergence of demonstrations and rioting in various Iranian cities earlier this month, Washington’s neoconservatives and interventionist/ imperial-minded “liberals” have been given a new lease on life in promoting their aspirations for “regime change” in Tehran. Indeed, of the three current potential global flashpoints—North Korea, Russian borderlands, and Iran in […]
By Richard Falk This post is a modified version of an article published in Middle East Eye on Jan. 1, 2018. It contends that the proper priority for genuine advocates of peace between Israelis and Palestinians should be centered around apartheid rather than be devoted to reviving an Oslo style ‘peace process’ (always a sham) […]
By Seyed Hossein Mousavian • Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) is steadily consolidating power in Riyadh and positioning himself to become the most powerful ruler in Saudi history. His rise has been accompanied with a ratcheting up of hostilities against Iran and even war rhetoric. As Saudi-Iran tensions increase, the lived experiences and leadership […]
By Emile Nakhleh December 29, 2017 • President Trump’s new National Security Strategy and the negative reaction his announcement on Jerusalem has generated in the UN Security Council and General Assembly do not bode well for America’s relations with friendly Arab countries and the wider Islamic world. Arab peoples and media seem bewildered by the […]
By Mark LeVine • Regime sponsorship of the arts could hurt artistic freedom of expression. Last month’s purchase of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, Salvator Mundi, for $450m by an associate of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) rocked the art world. It also called into question an already suspect anti-corruption drive launched by bin Salman in […]
By Richard Falk • Prefatory Note -This post addresses the need for dialogue with the political, economic, and cultural ‘other,’ that is, those multitudes acutely alienated from and angry with secular globalism and the Enlightenment legacy often equated with ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization.’ At the core is a search for closure on the nature of reality […]
By Derek Davison and Jim Lobe At LobeLog, December 27, 2017 • The 20th century was rife with partitions, many of them involving European powers carving up colonial possessions in Africa and the Middle East with what often appears to have been little or no concern for local realities. Perhaps the most famous of these […]