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HOW MITT ROMNEY DODGED THE DRAFT — H. Bruce Franklin remembers Romney from his Stanford days and lays out exactly how he and his father ensured he would evade service in the war which, at Stanford, he was demonstrating for. Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures. Wei Zhang assesses the social and health costs of China’s incredible GDP growth.
Archives by Tag 'Arab Spring'
Fifteen months after millions of Egyptians -led by the revolutionary youth- were united in their demand to end a corrupt and suffocating dictatorship, they were now divided as they headed to the polls in the last two days in order to elect a new president. During this tra...
Vijay Prashad’s new book, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter ...
There has always been something stagey and contrived about Israel’s blood-curdling declarations that it is going to bomb Iran, but as a strategy it has worked astonishingly well, at home and abroad. Benjamin Netanyahu has been expert at manipulating Israelis’ ...
Everyone wants to talk about the role of social media in last year’s uprisings, but the big Arab television news channels played just as significant a part in the Arab Spring. There is a limit to the extent to which mobile phones can replace professional cameras: their ...
Within the first few months of 2011, the U.S. and its allies lost three loyal “friends”: Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Zine el-Abbidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Saad Hariri in Lebanon. While Mubarak and Ali were driven out of power by widespread popular uprisings, Hariri was ...
The last twenty or so months have certainly been months of insurrection. This is perhaps no truer anywhere on earth than in the Middle East and northern Africa. Indeed, there is even a phrase describing this fact. That phrase is “the Arab Spring.” Exactly what...
I remember during the “Libyan Revolution”; the tally of casualties resulting from Gaddafi’s crack down on protesters was being reported by the mainstream media with such a “dramatic” fervor that it hardly left the public with a moment to at least second-guess th...
The US-Egypt relationship is on the rocks. If it is to be salvaged, both sides will need to change course and pay attention to the concerns of their respective publics, both of whom now hold negative views of each other.
In the year that has passed since massive an...
In the years of conscious, self-inflicted decline at home, “losses” continued to mount elsewhere. In the past decade, for the first time in 500 years, South America has taken successful steps to free itself from western domination, another serious loss. The region h...
When we heard gunshots coming from the cabinet building, we were certain they were blanks. Despite having seen the military use live rounds earlier that day, we had a naïve sense of security amongst the thousands in the streets.
When the screams and p...
When the youth took to the streets on 25 January 2011, a full-fledged revolution was to follow, but no one knew at the time. No one knew that the frustration with the old regime was irreversible. No one knew that the river of discontent had broken its banks. As endless th...
January 25 marked the one-year anniversary of the inception of Egypt’s revolution against the dictatorship of the Mubarak regime, eleven days after the success of the Tunisian revolution, when its former president Ben Ali fled the country. Within weeks of the brisk succ...
1 January : Egypt wakes to news of the attack on the Two Saints Church in Alexandria on New Year’s Eve. Twenty Copts are killed as well as the church’s Muslim police guard. More than 100 are injured. No group claims responsibility.
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“The Egyptian voices will be heard, and if not heard, it will be only because the blood already shed has not been enough…”
With these words, Saad Zaghloul, one of 20th century Egypt’s most celebrated nati...
Cairo.
One year ago in February 2011, getting to Egypt wasn’t that easy.
Back then, my London flight crew suddenly refused, in midair, to lay over in Cairo. Instead, we touched down in Athens where the airline did not actually even have...
In the final days of the Libyan conflict, as NATO conducted a nonstop bombing campaign, an Al Jazeera Arabic television correspondent’s actions raised more than eyebrows. They also raised serious questions regarding the journalistic responsibility of Arab media – or...
Nine months into the “Arab Spring”, we surveyed public opinion in seven Arab countries and Iran, asking over 6,000 respondents about their primary political concerns and their degree of satisfaction with the pace of change taking place in their countries. What...
If it feels to you a bit reminiscent of 1968 these days, that’s because it is.
And that’s a good thing.
It’s starting to look like 2011 was the year of Basta!, when people finally woke up and found the voice with which to say Enough! To say that it c...
A year ago the popular anger that grew into the Arab Spring was first ignited by an impoverished Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set fire to himself after his cart, his sole means of feeding his family, was confiscated by police. Within days, pi...
As the Arab Spring blossomed and President Obama hesitated about whether to speak out in favor of protesters seeking democratic change in the Greater Middle East, the Pentagon acted decisively. It forged ever deeper ties with some of the most repressive regimes in the r...
A friend, relative of a Tunisian family in Colorado, today took me for a ride in the hills above the Mediterranean just 2 kilometers north of La Marsa. On the way, we passed the residency of the French Ambassador and nearby, one of the trashed out mansions of the Ben ...
Ever since the fall of deposed president Hosni Mubarak last Feb. 11, the unity the Egyptian people had displayed during the previous 18 days has been slowly eroding.
This fracture began to emerge during the nationwide referendum on March 19. Shortly after assuming ...
As protests raged again across the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, offered his assessment of the Arab Spring last week. It was, he said, an “Islamic, anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave”, adding that Israel’s Arab ...
Editor’s Note: Occupy Oakland is part of a global movement that is questioning the basic structures of the political and economic system to an extent not seen since 1968. Whether it will succeed in changing these structures is unclear. But it has already...
We live in an enigmatic age, far more complex as the years go by and certainly since the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991. With the failure of so many reformers avoidance of cynicism about all causes is now an overwhelming challenge. In a sense, it is the r...