After months of Iraq dominating the headlines, the focus seems to have shifted to Islamic Iran. It began with American accusations that Iran was interfering in Iraq’s affairs, because of the close links between the Islamic state and some Iraqi Islamic leaders and movements...
Few doubt that the Iraqi Governing Council that met in Baghdad for the first time on July 13 exists primarily to serve the US’s objectives. The members of the council have been handpicked by L. Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Baghdad, rather than elected by Iraqis, either directly or indirectly...
Last month’s bomb-blasts at Western targets in Saudi Arabia and Morocco followed the conclusion of the US invasion of Iraq. The bomb-explosions in Riyadh on May 12 killed 24 people and wounded dozens. Four days later another 24 people were killed in five blasts in Casablanca, Morocco...
Several weeks after the US’s occupation of Iraq, its rule is in chaos. Iraq was the most advanced Arab country before the US destroyed its infrastructure in 1991; even after 1991, despite UN sanctions, there was a modicum of civil infrastructure and service provision...
Few empires have ever justified their enslavement and exploitation of subject peoples in such terms; the US is no exception. The Romans justified their imperialism by offering law and order...
The Oslo ‘peace process’ was finally buried at Camp David in July 2000 when the Palestinians refused then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak’s ‘generous’ offer of a final settlement. It was immediately clear that Israel’s object was to kill the peace process, while blaming the Palestinians for its demise...
The US invasion of Iraq has been widely described as the latest stage of a new American imperialism. It has also been described as intended to create a new regional order in the Middle East, often compared to the Sykes-Picot agreement after the first world war...
The sudden collapse of the Ba’athist regime in Iraq is not surprising, although most Muslims would have liked to see the US given a bloodier nose in the process. It can be attributed to two main factors...
The US and Great Britain (effectively one entity, the US/GB, in terms of their Iraq policy) proposed a draft resolution supposedly authorising military action against Iraq to the UN Security Council on February 24...
As this issue of Crescent International goes to press, an attack on Iraq seems inevitable. The US and Britain are expected to put their revised draft resolution before the UN Security Council at any moment, giving Iraq until March 17 to "disarm completely" or face attack...
Although millions of people from Manila to Montreal joined peace rallies on January 18, these may not prevent the US war-machine, fuelled by raw imperial ambition and lust for oil, from attacking Iraq. Americans are now playing a leading role in the peace movement...
Despite continuing politicking, now predominantly between the US and allies worried about its increasingly aggressive and destructive behaviour, America’s eventual occupation of Iraq seems inevitable...
The elections in Gujarat, won for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by Narendra Modi, the architect of the anti-Muslim pogroms in the state last year, overshadowed the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya...
One result of events since September 2001 has been some realization of the true nature of the West even among stubbornly pro-Western Muslims. Although Muslims around the world had long been aware of the malign nature of Western power, some had been dazzled by the glamour of the West’s culture and lifestyle...
Iraq handed UN officials a detailed dossier of its chemical, biological and nuclear research projects and facilities earlier this month, in accordance with last month’s UN resolution.
Israel stepped up operations in the West Bank and Ghazzah last month after two successful operations by Palestinian mujahideen: one against Israeli forces in al-Khalil on November 15, one a martyrdom bombing in Jerusalem.
The victory of the ‘Islamist’ Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey’s general elections earlier this month was greeted with incredulity and consternation among both Turkey’s secular elite and its Western allies, who have been wont to hold Kemalist Turkey up as a model of the separation of Islam and politics for other Muslim countries.
That the Americans used the September 11 attacks as a pretext to install a pro-Western regime in Afghanistan is clear. Many reasons have been touted: a desire to defeat an Islamic regime...
Anger is a dangerous emotion. In anger people say and do what they would never say or do when in full control of their faculties. Interestingly, it is also often an honest emotion.
Last month people around the world marked the first anniversary of the attacks in the US last year. The second anniversary of the beginning of the Al-Quds Intifada was also in September.
