The devastating bombings which struck the Egyptian city of Sharm al-Sheik on July 24 underscore both the extent of the threat from Islamist terrorists and the failure of the United States and its allies to effectively deal with it.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election victory in late June was a surprise
for pundits both inside and outside Iran. Not only did the proverbial favorite
Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani not win, but the turnout was around 60% in both rounds,
so the much-debated election boycott did not reduce participation to historic
lows. Ahmadinejad, Tehran’s mayor, with the help of the security-military
apparatus, mobilized his conservative base in the first round of balloting
to force an unprecedented second-round runoff against Hashemi-Rafsanjani. The
mayor then reached out to the political independent masses to win over 60%
of the vote. The unpredictability and close nature of the result (as well as
of Mohammad Khatami’s victory in 1997) are especially significant in
the Middle East, where elections, when they do occur, are often formalities.1
BASRA, IRAQ—The cracking towers and gas flares of the al-Daura oil refinery rise above the neighborhood on Baghdad’s outskirts that bears its name. On February 18, Ali Hassan Abd (Abu Fahad), a leader of the refinery’s union, was walking home from the Al Daura Refinery with his young children, when gunmen ran up and shot him.
In his April 2005 FPIF Discussion Paper “Reclaiming the Prophetic Voice (RTPV),” John Humphries describes how a group of clergy and lay people—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—drafted a Call to Resist the War in Iraq, which committed signers thereof to become actively complicit in differing acts of civil disobedience designed to end the illegal U.S. occupation and warfare in Iraq. Humphries describes the RTPV c all as inspired by and modeled after the 1967 Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority, which led to the formation of an organization named RESIST that actively opposed the illegal U.S. war against the South Vietnamese. The model indeed fits, as both calls are grounded in basic ethical principles rather than purely utilitarian concerns: The wars and occupations must be resisted, not because they were and are too costly or might drag on too long but because they were and are morally loathsome.
The election of the hard-line Teheran mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, over
former President Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani as the new head of Iran is
undeniably a setback for those hoping to advance greater social and political
freedom in that country. It should not necessarily be seen as a turn to the
right by the Iranian electorate, however. The 70-year old Rafsanjani—a cleric
and penultimate wheeler-dealer from the political establishment—was portrayed
as the more moderate conservative. The fact that he had become a millionaire
while in government was apparently seen as less important than his modest reform
agenda. By contrast, the young Teheran mayor focused on the plight of the poor
and cleaning up corruption.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 23, General John Abizaid, head of Central Command, told the committee: “Maybe it’s something we’re not doing right in the field. But I can tell you that when my soldiers … ask me the question whether or not they’ve got support from the American people or not, that worries me. And they’re starting to do that. So I would say we better have a frank discussion with ourselves. I am not against the debate.”
“When you’re in the middle of a conflict, you’re trying to find pillars of strength to lean on.”
The left has been snookered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for it is deeply opposed to the war yet supports the spread of democracy and civil freedoms. It is in the interests of the world that democracy should succeed in Iraq but that the U.S. has its nose bloodied in the process.
Until recently, I’ve been completely unimpressed with Washington antics. Politicians get paid a lot of money to do their jobs. They take an oath to uphold the Constitution. Watching them blatantly abdicate their responsibility in the run-up to the Iraq War was almost as difficult as watching most of America let them get away with it.
The Bush administration, like its predecessors, has frequently taken advantage of the idealism and values of the U.S. citizenry to justify foreign policies that most Americans would otherwise find morally unacceptable. The recent emphasis on justifying Washington’s imperial goals in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East in the name of spreading liberty and democracy is a case in point. The fact that the United States is the world’s principal supporter of autocratic Middle Eastern regimes is conveniently overlooked, as the administration focuses solely on the human rights abuses of governments that challenge U.S. hegemony in the region, such as Iran and Syria. Similarly, repeated emphasis of the fact that Israel has established advanced democratic institutions (at least for its Jewish citizens) and an accountable government (relative to anything that currently exists in the Arab world) makes it possible for most Americans to ignore the pattern of gross and systematic Israeli human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories.