Foreign Policy In Focus/Institute for Policy Studies, June 17, 2009
Since the end of the U.S.-led war against Serbia, the country is slowly emerging from the wars of the 1990s. Despite lingering problems, Serbs appear to be more optimistic about their country’s future than they have for decades. The United States deserves little credit for the positive developments, however, and a fair amount of blame for the country’s remaining problems. [source]
Category: Source
Why American Neo-Cons Wanted Ahmadinejad to Win
Huffington Post, July 18, 2009| Updated May 25, 2011
The only people happier than the Iranian elites over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s apparently stolen election win Friday, were the neoconservatives and other hawks eager to block any efforts by the Obama administration to moderate U.S. policy toward the Islamic republic. Since he was elected president in 2005, Ahmadinejad has filled a certain niche in the American psyche formerly filled by the likes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi as the Middle Eastern leader we most love to hate. It gives us a sense of righteous superiority to compare ourselves favorably to these seemingly irrational and fanatical foreign despots. Better yet, if these despots can be inflated into far greater threats than they actually are, these supposed threats can be used to justify the enormous financial and human costs of maintaining American armed forces in that volatile region… [source]
Iran’s Stolen Election Has Sparked an Uprising — What Should the U.S. Do?
Huffington Post, July 16, 2009, by Stephen Zunes [source]
As the fraudulent outcomes in the presidential races of 2000 in the United States and 2006 in Mexico demonstrate, elections can be stolen without the public rising up to successfully challenge the results. There have been cases, however, where such attempted thefts have been overturned through massive nonviolent resistance, as in the Philippines in 1985, Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, and Ukraine in 2005. It is unclear as of this writing how the people of Iran will react to what increasingly appears to be the theft of their presidential election. So far, protests have been scattered, lacking in discipline and therefore easily suppressed. A general strike is planned, however, and a more cohesive and strategic resistance movement may emerge.
How Clinton and the Democrats Made Possible Israel’s Settlements Expansion
Huffington Post July 16, 2009 by Stephen Zunes [source]
President Barack Obama has inherited a difficult challenge in pushing Israel to end the expansion of its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. With the right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu categorically rejecting the idea of a freeze and with Democratic-controlled Congress ruling out using the billions of dollars of U.S. military aid to Israel as leverage, the situation remains deadlocked.
Biden’s Hawkish Record
Huffington Post July 13, 2009 by Stephen Zunes
When Barack Obama picked Joe Biden as his running mate, he drew sharp criticism from his anti-war base because of Biden’s support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, his flagrantly false claims about the alleged Iraqi threat, and the abuse of his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to suppress antiwar testimony before Congress prior to the invasion. A look at the senator’s 35-year record on Capitol Hill indicates that Iraq was not an isolated case and that Biden has frequently allied with more hawkish Democrats and Republicans. [source]
Will Democrats Finally End their Support for West Bank Settlements? (Part Two)
Huffington Post, July 10, 2009
(This is the second of a two part series: click here for part one)
Recent calls by President Barack Obama for the government of Israel to freeze the expansion of Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank marks a sharp reversal from Democratic Party policy toward the Israeli colonization of Palestinian land. Indeed, for the past 20 years, Democrats in Washington have largely supported such Israeli expansionism in which Israeli occupation forces confiscate Palestinian land in territories seized in the June 1967 war to build Jewish-only communities… [source]
How Not to Support Democracy in the Middle East
Foreign Policy In Focus/Institute for Policy Studies, June 8, 2009
President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo to the Muslim world marked a welcome departure from the Bush administration’s confrontational approach. Yet many Arabs and Muslims have expressed frustration that he failed to use this opportunity to call on the autocratic Saudi and Egyptian leaders with whom he had visited on his Middle Eastern trip to end their repression and open up their corrupt and tightly controlled political systems. [source]
Video interview: Obama Visits Concentration Camp in Germany (video)
As Obama Tries to Shift the Debate, Will Democrats Continue to Endorse Israel’s Colonization of the West Bank
Alternet June 6, 2009 by Stephen Zunes [source]
President Barack Obama has inherited a difficult challenge in pushing Israel to end the expansion of its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. With the right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu categorically rejecting the idea of a freeze and with Democratic-controlled Congress ruling out using the billions of dollars of U.S. military aid to Israel as leverage, the situation remains deadlocked.
Telling the Lebanese How to Vote
Huffington Post, July 7, 2009, |Updated May 25, 2011:
In recent visits to Lebanon, both Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made clear that the United States would react negatively if the March 8th Alliance — a broad coalition of Islamist, Maronite, leftist, nationalist, and pan-Arabist parties — won the upcoming parliamentary elections. These not-so-subtle threats have led to charges of U.S. interference in Lebanon’s domestic affairs. What prompts U.S. concerns is that the largest member of this coalition is Hezbollah, the populist Shiite party which the United States considers to be a terrorist organization. [source]
Echoes of Solidarity 20 Years after Tiananmen
Common Dreams June 4, 2009 & HuffingtonPost July 5, 2009:
Twenty years ago today, I was at Camp Thoreau in New York’s Catskill Mountains [with] volunteers huddled around the radio listening to incoming reports of the massacre then unfolding in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Serving as the emcee for the concert that evening, I broke the news to the 300 or so singers, songwriters, and musicians assembled. I looked out upon an audience composed of amazing performing artists – Fred Small, Betsy Rose, Charlie King, Matt Jones, Pat Humphries, and many others – who had spent their lives singing songs about such struggles for freedom and justice. The shock, anger and despair was overwhelming. I reminded that, despite efforts by the corporate media to portray the student movement in China as some kind of campaign against socialism, it was in fact a campaign against the tyranny and injustice of Communist Party rule and for a more just and democratic society, a society where workers and peasants had power in reality, not only in name…
Defending Israeli War Crimes
Foreign Policy In Focus/Institute for Policy Studies
May 28, 2009, by Emily Schwartz Greco and Stephen Zunes
In response to a series of reports by human rights organizations and international legal scholars documenting serious large-scale violations of international humanitarian law by Israeli armed forces in its recent war on the Gaza Strip, 10 U.S. state attorneys general sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defending the Israeli action. It is virtually unprecedented for state attorneys general — whose mandates focus on enforcement of state law — to weigh in on questions regarding the laws of war, particularly in a conflict on the far side of the world. More significantly, their statement runs directly counter to a broad consensus of international legal opinion that recognizes that Israel, as well as Hamas, engaged in war crimes. [source]
Hawkish Union Leaders Hurting Teachers and Your Kid
Huffington Post June 25, 2009: Despite a new presidential administration and an expanded Democratic majority in Congress, teachers and their unions are under unprecedented assault through budget cuts and so-called reform efforts geared toward giving corporations increased access to, and management responsibilities for, public schools. Unfortunately, as a result of years of support for a right-wing U.S. foreign policy, the once-powerful teachers union — the American Federation of Teachers — has so damaged its credibility and alienated its membership that its position has been seriously weakened. [source]
Hillary Clinton’s First 100 Days
National Catholic Reporter May 11, 2009 and Huffington Post Jun 25, 2009, |Updated May 25, 2011]:
Hillary Clinton has received mixed though generally favorable reviews, both internationally and domestically, during her first 100 days as secretary of state. Public opinion polls in the United States give her a more than 70 percent-positive rating. Still, concerns linger regarding her eight years in the Senate, during which she supported some of the more controversial initiatives of the Bush administration, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, criticisms of the World Court and United Nations, and defense of Israeli occupation policies and military offenses against its neighbors.
Panel Talk with Naomi Klein and Matt Rothschild: Challenging U.S. Empire (video)
Progressive Magazine’s 100 year celebration panel May 14, 2009:
Matt Rothschild, Naomi Kline, Prof. Stephen Zunes
Interview: The Afghanistan Mess (audio)
CourageToResist.org May 10, 2009: “Middle East scholar Dr. Stephen Zunes talks about how U.S. imperial hubris helped create, and continues to deepen and intensify the deadly chaos in Afghanistan. “The war not only was raised some moral and legal questions, but it has not resolved the situation, it has made matters worse. The problem is that there has been a gross oversight on the military side of the equation. The really important issues have been overlooked…”
Pelosi the Hawk
Foreign Policy In Focus/IPS April 27, 2009, by John Feffer & Stephen Zunes
Reports by international human rights groups and from within Israel in recent weeks have revealed the massive scale of war-crimes and other violations of international humanitarian law, committed by Israeli forces during their three-week offensive against the Gaza Strip earlier this year. Despite this, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has steadfastly stood by her insistence that the U.S.-backed Israeli government has no legal or moral responsibility for the tragic consequence of the war.
This is just one episode in a long history of efforts by Pelosi to undermine international humanitarian law, regarding actions by a country she has repeatedly referred to as America’s most important ally in the Middle East. It’s also part of her overall right-wing agenda in the Middle East. As the powerful Speaker of the House, Pelosi could very well undermine efforts by President Barack Obama in the coming years to moderate U.S. policy toward that volatile region. [source]
Missing an Anti-Racism Moment
Foreign Policy In Focus/IPS April 22, 2009, by Stephen Zunes
In boycotting the United Nations conference on racism, the Obama administration demonstrated that just because an African American can be elected president doesn’t mean the United States will be any more committed than the Bush administration in fighting global racism. Rejecting calls by liberal Democratic members of Congress, leading human rights groups, Pope Benedict XVI, and most of the international community to participate, the Obama administration instead gave into pressure by Congressional hawks and other anti-UN forces by joining a handful of other nations refusing to participate in the historic gathering. [source]
The Stealing of the Iranian Election
[Huffington Post, July 15, 2009] It is certainly not unprecedented for Western observers to miscalculate the outcome of an election in a country where pre-election polls are not as rigorous as Western countries, particularly when there is a clear bias towards a particular candidate. At the same time, the predictions of knowledgeable Iranian observers from various countries and from across the political spectrum were nearly unanimous in the belief that the leading challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi would defeat incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decisively in yesterday’s presidential election, certainly in the runoff if not in the first round. This also appeared to be the assumption among independent observers in Iran itself…
The War on Yugoslavia, 10 Years Later
Foreign Policy In Focus/IPS April 6, 2009, by Emily Schwartz Greco, Stephen Zunes [source]
It has been 10 years since the U.S.-led war on Yugoslavia. For many leading Democrats, including some in top positions in the Obama administration, it was a “good” war, in contrast to the Bush administration’s “bad” war on Iraq. And though the suffering and instability unleashed by the 1999 NATO military campaign wasn’t as horrific as the U.S. invasion of Iraq four years later, the war was nevertheless unnecessary and illegal, and its political consequences are far from settled. Unless there’s a willingness to critically re-examine the war, the threat of another war in the name of liberal internationalism looms large…