The smart, experienced Arab-American community leader and activist Abdeen Jabara and I are engaged in, I guess, a spirited discussion over at Mondoweiss of the value of Michael Fishbach’s latest book, The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left. I spent a long time working on the review of … Continue reading Discussing Palestine and the US radical movement of the 1960s & ’70s.
Amb. Robert E. Hunter had a compelling piece on the Lobelog site recently in which he warned that the House Democratic leaders’ choice of the Ukraine issue on which to hang their impeachment hearings for Pres. Trump means that the discussion of both Ukraine and Russia in the U.S. political system has now become seriously … Continue reading U.S. Dems’ dangerous demagoguing on Russia
These four privileged older white guys have all sought (and been granted) exposure in the corporate media recently. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the prime architects and advocates of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was given this fine platform on the NYT’s opinion page in order to criticize Pres. Trump’s recent decision to withdraw (or late, … Continue reading What do Paul Wolfowitz, Dan Kurtzer, Aaron Miller, and Prince Andrew have in common?
My piece on Pompeo’s November 18 declaration on Israeli settlements went up on Lobelog today, here. In the piece, I used some of the ideas from Andrew Bacevich’s 2002 book American Empire: The realities and consequences of U.S. diplomacy. This article is part of a broader project I’m pursuing to explore the phenomenon of imperial … Continue reading On empires, reluctant or otherwise
A few months ago, my friend Chuck Fager invited me to contribute a chapter to an anthology he was preparing under the title Passing the Torch: When Quaker Lives Speak. Chuck suffered some bad medical things in recent weeks but he persisted with the project and ten days ago the volume went up for sale … Continue reading On thinking about writing a memoir
Yesterday, Pres. Rejep Tayyip Erdogan was here in DC. His presence and the apparently lengthy meeting he had with Pres. Trump both attracted many criticisms and a non-trivial street protest in the square across from the White House. Yes, there are numerous serious things to criticize Erdogan for, including some of those mentioned in the … Continue reading Some quick thoughts on Turkey
On October 30, representatives of Syria’s government, opposition, and civil society came together in Geneva at the inaugural meeting in Geneva of the Syrian Constitution Committee (SCC), the most promising effort yet to negotiate an end to the country’s hyper-destructive civil war. But just the day before the SCC opened, a court in Germany charged … Continue reading Syria: Peacemaking or prosecutions?
The United Nations’ Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, recently expressed confidence that the Syrian Constitutional Committee (SCC), a key gathering of representatives of the country’s government, opposition, and civil society, can convene as planned in Geneva, October 30. If this does occur-even with, perhaps a slippage of a few days-it could mark the beginning … Continue reading Can the Turkey-Russia Agreement Help Syrians End Their Civil War?
Washington, DC — It took less than a week after President Trump announced the summary withdrawal of the tripwire U.S. force deployed in northeast Syria alongside the Kurdish-dominated “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF), before the SDF concluded a new alliance with the Syrian government. What happened between, of course, was the large-scale incursion of Turkish forces into the … Continue reading U.S. forces (and policy) in Syria head south
Over the past three-plus months it has become increasingly clear that, despite the bombast that Pres. Donald Trump has hurled against the Islamic Republic of Iran (along with a full deck of extremely harmful sanctions and some cyber attacks), neither he nor his closest regional allies in the anti-Iran coalition have been willing to escalate … Continue reading Mutual deterrence: Good for the Middle East, bad for the nuclear weapons industry?
