Iran is unlikely to give in to US and Israeli threats because the political elite in Tehran have staked their reputation on the nuclear issue and the Iranian’s do not believe that either the United States or Israel has either the ability or the willingness to attack their facilities. If Iran has miscalculated then there is the potential that the Middle East may erupt into an enormously damaging international conflict that will have significant ramifications for the international economic system.
In the west, China’s rise and increased attention to fundamentalist Islam have caused many to perceive a global contest in the export of values. At this particular crossroads of history there seem to be several very different maps for the future. In this context, many speak of the ‘decline of the west’, but what is it exactly?
If America learns nothing else from the misadventure in Iraq, it should learn the high price of unlawful war. Yet, in an eerie atmosphere of déjà vue, we are hearing the drumbeat for war once again—this time against Iran. Only now we hear virtually nothing about the legal right to go to war. This is particularly odd since the law against attacking Iran is even clearer than the law against invading Iraq.
The United States, as the most powerful state in the international system, has adopted two radically differing approaches in answer the post-Cold War security dilemma. It is a choice between these alternative approaches that the presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, now pose in quite stark form.
Prof. James Petras’s response to my article in the New York Times of 18 July 2008 (which, incidentally, was also published in the International Herald Tribune, Die Welt am Sonntag, and Corriere della Sera) is truly contemptible, and makes one wonder about the guidelines of admission to professorships. Practically every sentence in his piece contains an error or dishonesty.
On July 18, 2008 The New York Times published an article by Israeli-Jewish historian, Professor Benny Morris, advocating an Israeli nuclear-genocidal attack on Iran with the likelihood of killing 70 million Iranians. What does this tell us about US politics and culture?
July 8th 2008 marked a new chapter in the expansion of US plans for Ballistic Missile Defence with the signing of a framework agreement that allows for the placement of missile defence ‘X-Band’ radar in the Czech Republic. But what are the prospects for its success?
The magical thinking behind the ‘war on terror’ has allowed a radical disconnect between problem and solution – most glaringly, between 9/11 and attacking Iraq. Solutions offered by leaders with a degree of certainty often appeal to publics even if they are apparently illogical. But why pursue such policies at all?
Last week, the National War Powers Commission published its report on how to fix war powers. The Commission notes that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 has been monumentally ineffective at resolving fundamental questions — both constitutional and political — of war powers.
For the first time since 1952, neither an incumbent president nor a vice president of the incumbent’s party is running for the White House in the US presidential election of 2008. The 2008 election and its outcome thus represent something of an unknown quantity not only to the American electorate, but to the rest of the world as well.
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