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Iraq: Ten Years Later
![[Crop from cover of Spring 2013 issue of Middle East Report]](/content_images/3/sm_10yearslater.jpg "[Crop from cover of Spring 2013 issue of Middle East Report]")
“The Iraq war is largely about oil,” wrote Alan Greenspan in his memoir The Age of Turbulence(2007). “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows.” It may indeed be self-evident that the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, as the former Federal Reserve chairman says, because of oil. But what does this proposition mean? The answer is not so obvious. Part of the plan may have been that regime change in Iraq would open the country’s ...
Keep Reading »Announcing The New Issue of Middle East Report Spring 2013
![[Crop from cover of Spring 2013 issue of Middle East Report]](/content_images/3/sm_covermeriraq.jpg "[Crop from cover of Spring 2013 issue of Middle East Report]")
IRAQ TEN YEARS LATER With few exceptions, the rush of reflections on the decennial marker of the US-led invasion of Iraq ignored the fact that the war happened mostly for Iraqis. Already devastated by 20 years of war, sanctions and dictatorship, Iraq suffered another decade of foreign occupation, civil strife and mass displacement. The spring 2013 issue of Middle East Report takes a hard look at “Iraq Ten Years Later,” including the question of ...
Keep Reading »Announcing the New Issue of Middle East Report Winter 2012
![[Crop of cover of new issue MER.]](/content_images/3/sm_meripegypt2yrs.jpg "[Crop of cover of new issue MER.]")
EGYPT: THE UPRISING TWO YEARS ON On January 25, 2011, spirited bands of protesters joined hands in the epochal popular revolt that would unseat Husni Mubarak, Egypt’s dictator of 30 years. Where is the country headed, with a new civilian government (for now) at the helm? The winter 2012 issue of Middle East Report offers reflections upon “Egypt: The Uprising Two Years On.” 2012 was not 1952, as historian Ahmad Shokr writes: Unlike the Free Officers who ...
Keep Reading »Announcing the New Issue of Middle East Report Fall 2012
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PIVOT, REBALANCE, RETRENCH A 2011 poll of Washington savants found that, Democrat and Republican, most of them view the Middle East as declining in strategic value in relation to Asia and the Pacific. On cue, the Obama administration rolled out its plan to “pivot” to Asia in deploying the US Navy and investing diplomatic energy. It turns out, however, that a major reason for this “rebalancing” is to police China’s access to the Indian Ocean and, from there, the Persian ...
Keep Reading »Announcing the New Issue of Middle East Report Spring 2012
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PULL OF THE POSSIBLE Are the upheavals in the Arab world revolutions? Uprisings? Perhaps all such terms are misnomers, in that they imply an end point to processes that may not have a terminus. Regimes may fall or stand; movements may sputter or succeed in establishing a more democratic system. It often seems as if there are two parallel universes, one of revolution and one of retrenchment, which periodically collide with varying degrees of violence. The key, ...
Keep Reading »Syria's Torment
![[Demonstration in Hama on July 29, 2011. Image from rferl.org]](/content_images/3/sm_meripsyria.jpg "[Demonstration in Hama on July 29, 2011. Image from rferl.org]")
There are two political-intellectual prisms through which the recurrent conflagrations of the modern Middle East are conventionally seen. One casts the region’s stubborn ills as internally caused -- by the outsize role of religion in public life, the persistence of primordial identities like sect and tribe, and the centuries-long accretion of patriarchal norms. The other espies the root of all evils in external interference, from European colonialism to the creation of ...
Keep Reading »The Fateful Choice
![[President Obama during his announcement that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by a US Navy SEAL operation. Image from mediabistro.com]](/content_images/3/sm_obamaosamadead.jpg "[President Obama during his announcement that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by a US Navy SEAL operation. Image from mediabistro.com]")
When 19 al-Qaeda hijackers attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the United States faced a strategic dilemma that was unique in magnitude, but not in kind. Terrorists had killed numerous civilians before, in the US and elsewhere, with and without state sponsorship. Al-Qaeda was not the first non-state actor to present no coherent demands alongside its propaganda of the deed or to have no single fixed address. Nor were Americans the first victims of ...
Keep Reading »Of Principle and Peril
![[Voting at UN Security Council. Image from politics365.com]](/content_images/3/sm_prinper.jpg "[Voting at UN Security Council. Image from politics365.com]")
Reasonable, principled people can disagree about whether, in an ideal world, Western military intervention in Libya’s internal war would be a moral imperative. With Saddam Hussein dead and gone, there is arguably no more capricious and overbearing dictator in the Arab world than Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi. The uprising of the Libyan people against him, beginning on February 17, was courageous beyond measure. It seems certain that, absent outside help, the subsequent armed ...
Keep Reading »Red-White-and-Black Valentine
![[Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_egypt_001.jpg "[Image from unknown archive]")
There are moments in world affairs that call for the suspension of disbelief. At these junctures, caution ought to be suppressed and cynicism forgotten to let joy and wonderment resound. Across the globe, everyone, at least everyone with a heart, knows that the Egyptian revolution of 2011 is such a time. Before January 25, date of the mass protests that kicked off the revolutionary fortnight in Cairo and other cities, Egypt was another populous, impoverished country ...
Keep Reading »Dead-Enders on the Potomac
Every US administration has its mouthpiece in Washington’s think tank world, its courtier that will slavishly praise its every utterance. For the blessedly bygone Bush administration, that echo chamber was the American Enterprise Institute and the neo-conservative broadsheets in its orbit. For the Obama administration, it is the National Security Network, an operation founded in 2006 to bring “strategic focus to the progressive national security community.” With one ...
Keep Reading »Bio
The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) is a progressive, independent organization based in Washington, DC. Since 1971 MERIP has provided critical analysis of the Middle East, focusing on political economy, popular struggles and the implications of US and international policy for the region. Visit www.merip.org for more information, including the most recent issue of Middle East Report.
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