While it is important that the Bush tax giveaway to the wealthy begin to be reversed if the US budget is ever to recover its health, the bigger significance of the budget deal passed yesterday by both houses of Congress is that the wind power tax break was restored for 2013. Actually, even this extension […]
The Rise of the Sunnis and the Decline of Iran, Iraq and Hizbullah: The Middle East in 2013
2013 will see Iranian influence in the Middle East continue a decline that began with the Arab upheavals of 2011. Iran’s two major allies in the Arab world are Syria and Lebanon. In Lebanon, Iran arms the Shiite party-militia Hizbullah, and does so overland through Iraq and Syria. Since Israel controls the Mediterranean off Lebanon […]
Dubai New Year’s Fireworks Display, 2013
Fireworks at the iconic Burj Khalifa in Dubai for 2013: Dubai is back. Its economy grew 3.2 percent in 2012, owing in part to good economic growth among its two major trade partners, China and India, and in part to the United Arab Emirates federal government having stepped in to use government stimulus to achieve […]
Dear Neocons: Iraqis still don’t feel liberated: Iraq’s Sunni Arab Spring
Demonstrations and rallies began being held in the largely Sunni Arab province of al-Anbar and spread to Samarra (Salahuddin) and Nineva in Iraq on December 26. Sometimes crowds flew the flag of the Free Syrian Army, with which Iraqi Sunnis often identify, since the FSA is fighting a Shiite-dominated regime. The Sunni Arab youth are […]
Dave Eggers’ Hologram for the King: Favorite Novel of 2012
Dave Eggers’ novel, Hologram for the King, was the best novel I read in 2012. The book centers on an American telecom company hoping to make a sale in Saudi Arabia, which requires literally camping out at a prospective artificial city (King Abdul Aziz Economic City) near Jidda on the Red Sea coast. The protagonist, […]
Rape in India, and the Low Status of Women
The unnamed Indian woman who was gang-raped on a bus in New Delhi and had to be sent to Singapore for medical treatment has died and her body has been cremated back in Delhi, provoking further protests throughout India. Aljazeera English reports Rape is always about power, not sex. India is a highly patriarchal society. […]
Best Green Energy Responses to Climate Crisis: IC’s 2012 Amun-Ra Award
I have created an annual Amun-Ra award for heroic green energy responses to our global climate crisis. Climate change is by far the most urgent of the threats to human existence that human beings can do something about. We are moving rapidly, by virtue of our massive carbon emissions, toward a climate that may be […]
Top 10 Ways the Middle East Changed, 2012
1. The end of any potential ‘two state solution’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s far right wing Likud government, headed by Binyamin Netanyahu, built or committed to build thousands of new family domiciles for Israeli squatters in Palestinian territory. In the absence of a Palestinian state, Palestinians are doomed to statelessness and a lack of […]
Schwarzkopf (RIP) and How the United States got Bogged Down in the Middle East
Gen. Norman H. Schwarzkopf is dead at 78. He died of pneumonia. Schwarzkopf was among the military leaders who repositioned the United States as a Middle Eastern hegemon. The US had interests in the Middle East from World War II forward, but the region was frankly on the back burner. The central American military and […]