Even by modern standards, the last month has been spectacularly bloody in the scale of the political violence seen. It opened with the Ashura killings in Iraq and Pakistan, in which several hundred Shi’a were slaughtered...
José María Aznar, the right wing prime minister of Spain who was the only European leader to join George Bush and Tony Blair in their invasion of Iraq, paid the price for his defiance of Spanish public opinion on March 14, when the Spanish electorate voted him out of office...
Production of this issue of Crescent International has been considerably hampered by the fact that it has coincided with the series of one-day cricket matches between Pakistan and India at the beginning of the Indian team’s first tour of Pakistan since 1989...
The two-week Israeli onslaught on Ghazzah that began at the end of February was evidently designed to bring Hamas to its knees, after months of an ever-tightening economic blockade and political pressure that Israel and its allies hoped would persuade the people of Ghazzah to turn against the Islamic movement that they elected to power in 2006.
All the West’s well-established theories about the political evolution of the Islamic state of Iran were thrown into disarray on February 20, when Iran’s parliamentary elections passed off peacefully...
There are so many aspects of the West’s war on Islam that it is difficult to credit them all. One little-noticed one is the drive for ‘democracy’ in the Muslim world. The call for democracy has become a staple of self-justifying Western rhetoric. Why do Muslim hate America? Americans ask...
After the pre-Christmas respite afforded by the conveniently-timed capture of Saddam, the US occupation of Iraq became more troubled again last month. Paul O’Neill, former US treasury secretary, gave the highest-level confirmation to date that Bush and his clique had been planning an invasion of Iraq from their first days in office...
The huge Muslim anger that greeted French proposals to ban hijab in schools and other public institutions has shocked the French establishment. Whether the depth of anger demonstrated when French Muslims took to the streets on January 17 will be sufficient to force the government to rethink its plans remains to be seen...
The US’s apparent capture of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein on December 13 has enabled the Bush administration to end the year on a rather higher note than they can have expected, particularly after November had proved to be the worst month yet of the US occupation of Iraq...
A ban on French Muslimahs wearing hijab in public schools seems inevitable after president Jacques Chirac voiced support for the findings of a government commission recommending that "visible religious symbols" be banned as inconsistent with the French state’s secular ethos...
In political science, power is defined as the ability to achieve a desired outcome; to translate’s one will into reality. Power is recognised as having various aspects, which theorists have described in various ways. Some distinguish between the "power to do" something and "power over" others...
The tortuous saga of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s inspection of Iran’s nuclear program finally reached a conclusion of sorts on November 25, when it was announced that the powers represented on the body and of the UN Security Council had agreed the text of a new resolution accepting the conclusions of an IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program...
Three years after the outbreak of the latest Al-Aqsa intifada -- which has lasted so long and moved on so far that few even remember how the troubles began -- the world has tired of Palestine...
The Nobel peace prize has always been based on political considerations; advancement of peace has had very little to do with it. The Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel--after whom the award is named--reflects the irony of the situation: he invented explosives, hardly the stuff to promote peace...
When US president George W. Bush came to the UN General Assembly on September 23, there was some expectation that his tone would be magnanimous and conciliatory. Six months after the US rode roughshod over the UN by launching a unilateral war against the wishes not only of the majority of the world’s unimportant states, but also of senior members of the Security Council, it was expected that the US might come to mend fences, as if from a position of strength, but with the underlying reality that the US needs international cooperation in the administration of occupied Iraq, given the problems it is having in securing its catch.
Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) begins its annual conference on September 26, as Crescent goes to press. On the face of it, the conference will no doubt be an impressive political occasion. It is expected to be attended by up to 2,200 party members, and will be chaired by party chairman Hosni Mubarak. His son, Gamal Mubarak, is due to address the conference’s first session in his capacity as chairman of the party’s influential Policy Secretariat, on the coordination that has been taking place between the party and government.
As the end of the year approaches, American political circles are getting into gear for the electoral campaigns which will dominate 2004, culminating in the presidential elections at the end of the year.
The bombing of the UN office in Baghdad on August 19 was the largest resistance attack on the Western occupiers since the invasion in March. At least 20 people were killed, including Sergio de Mello, the diplomat heading the UN’s mission in Iraq...
Political controversies seem to be brewing in both the US and Britain about the evidence that the Bush and Blair governments used to justify their Iraq war. Bush was forced to admit on July 7 that his State of the Union speech in January contained false allegations about Iraq’s nuclear programme...
That the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon gave the US an invaluable opportunity for a massive projection of power — as predicted by Crescent International (Editorial, October 1-15, 2001) — is now widely accepted...
