Category: Middle East

Middle East Overview

Supporting Nonviolence in Syria

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Foreign Policy December 20, 2012, by Stephen Zunes
[Also at Truthout.org and International Center for Nonviolent Conflict]
While a growing number of people are calling for increased military aid to armed insurgents or even direct military intervention, as the French government has said it will consider, to support the armed opposition would likely exacerbate the Syrian people’s suffering and appear to validate the tragic miscalculation by parts of the Syrian opposition to supplant their bold and impressive nonviolent civil insurrection with an armed insurgency…

The No State Solution (video)

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Alternative Focus video September 10, 2012
   The No State Solution is the latest contribution from Alternate Focus to examine the Israeli-Palestine conflict. This 28-minute video first explores political barriers to any solution, and then possible resolutions. The video features interviews with Dr. Stephen Zunes (Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco), Miko Peled (author of “The General’s Son”), and Jeff Warner (Jewish peace activist in Los Angeles and author of this review), interleaved with the filmmakers narrative are abundant modern and archival clips… [Also at YouTube]

U.S. policy at U.N. hurts prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace

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Full Article. [Source is no longer available. Related links].
Up until the mid-20th century, the time at which nonwhite, non-Western nations could be free, their specific boundaries and the conditions of their independence could only be gained through negotiations between the colonial occupiers and approved representatives of the conquered peoples. It was not the purview of the UN or any other international legal authority to adjudicate such matters, since the rights of those in the colonies were limited to what was willingly agreed to by the colonizers.

Can U.S. Citizens End Israel’s Legal Impunity?

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YES! Magazine November 21, 2012. Republished by Baltimore Nonviolence Center, Common Dreams, Transcend.org and Transnational.org: The great wish of the early Zionist leader Theodor Herzl was that Israel would be treated like “any other state.” Were that the case, there might be more rational and productive discourse regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is particularly critical in light of Israel launching yet another devastating attack against civilian-populated areas.

Interview: On Foreign Policy Debate; Yifat Susskind on Iraq War’s Toxic Legacy (audio)

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Counterspin October 26, 2012 [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting; Zunes’s segment begins at 11 mins.]
The final presidential debate, addressing international issues, managed to promote several falsehoods about U.S. foreign policy. No, the Iranian president never said he wanted Israel “wiped off the map,” and the U.S. did not treat South Africa’s racist apartheid rulers badly…. In other words, the debate was inline with how media and the candidates have treated foreign policy throughout the campaign. Also on CounterSpin today: The toxic legacy of the Iraq War. See also Obama, Romney and the Foreign Policy Debate, Foreign Policy in Focus, 10/23/12.

Embassy Protests and Middle East Unrest in Context

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Foreign Policy in Focus/Institute for Policy Studies, September 17, 2012
Republished by: Arthur’s Peace Blog, Eurasia Review, Huffington Post, Middle East Spectator, Transnational.org
It seems bizarre… some media pundits are criticizing Arabs as being “ungrateful” for U.S. support of pro-democracy movements when, in reality, the U.S. initially opposed the popular movements that deposed Western-backed despots in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, and remains a preeminent backer of dictatorships in the region today…

The Case Against War: Ten Years Later

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Foreign Policy In Focus/Institute for Policy Studies, Sept. 11, 2012.
By Stephen Zunes. Republished by: Common Dreams, Transnational.org, The American Bear, and Promised Land Museum.
“Ten years ago, I wrote a series of articles for the Foreign Policy in Focus website, in which I put forth a series of arguments against the Bush administration’s push for a U.S. invasion of Iraq prior to the fateful congressional vote authorizing the illegal, unnecessary, and ultimately disastrous war. At the request of the editors of The Nation – the oldest continually published weekly magazine in the United States – I wrote a version entitled “The Case Against War,” which appeared on their website September 12, 2002, and as the cover story of the September 30 issue. It became one of the most widely circulated articles in the magazine’s 147-year-old history. Every congressional office received multiple copies. In the articles, I correctly predicted that an invasion would result in sectarian violence, terrorism, Islamist extremism, and a bloody counterinsurgency war that would be the most elaborate and expensive deployment of U.S. forces since the Second World War…”