Very few things about the political state of Iraq can accurately be described as clear. But now that the flag has been cased and the last 4,000 US troops are on the way home, some sort of preliminary balance sheet is finally possible. As president Obama told the troops at the military base in Fort […]
Posts Tagged ‘Arab Uprisings’
What Bin Laden’s death really means
May 3rd, 2011 by Michael Meacher.Osama Bin Laden’s killing is a huge symbolic victory for the US, but just that – symbolic. Al Qaeda always was, and remains, a quintessentially decentralised organisation and over the last decade Bin Laden has never been able to sustain any significant organisational capability because of the risk of electronic detection. To that extent his […]
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The epicentre of the Arab spring isn’t Libya or Syria; it’s Palestine
Apr 30th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria, rumblings in Morocco and Algeria (and eventually Saudi?) even spreading south into sub-Saharan Africa such as Uganda, but the centre of this upturning of the old despotic order is Palestine. The tectonic shift in the latter has been little noticed, but is more momentous than any of the others. Palestine for […]
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Royal Wedding Special No 2: Tyrants on the guest list
Apr 27th, 2011 by Jon Lansman.The royal wedding is not a state occasion, or so it was claimed to justify the non-inclusion of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Perhaps that is just as well, since Westminster Abbey would have contained many more tyrants if it was. Neverthess the guest list still contains seven “royal” tyrants who are expected to attend […]
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Left opinion shifts against Libyan intervention
Apr 4th, 2011 by Jon Lansman.Two organisations today came out against military intervention in Libya, perhaps indicating that opinion amongst Labour MPs is not representative of the Labour movement as a whole. Unite, the biggest union in the UK, has today called for a halt to the air attacks on Libya and an immediate ceasefire, saying that the intervention is a mistake and will […]
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Revolution and the rise of Al Jazeera
Mar 30th, 2011 by Mark Seddon.Perhaps it was unintended, but two or three weeks ago, at the height of the protests that were gripping the great cities of Egypt, the director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, appeared on the channel’s flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, in London as part of a debate on the future of newsgathering, and mentioned […]
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What’s the Exit Strategy, Dave?
Mar 24th, 2011 by Dan McCurry.Overnight he was transformed from Mr Bean to Stalin. In the same way that Thatcher had her Falklands, Cameron had his Libya. But then it didn’t go according to plan. At the first site of a cruise missile, Gaddafi didn’t throw down his weapons and put his hands in the air. Nor did he try […]
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Time for an inquiry into the use of British arms in the Middle East
Mar 24th, 2011 by Owen Jones.Last Friday, over 50 unarmed protesters were murdered by Yemen’s Western-backed dictatorship. As growing unrest threatened to make Ali Abdullah Saleh the third tyrant toppled by the fury of the Arab street, the dictator opted for a shoot-to-kill policy against his own people:
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Libya: regret and reservations
Mar 22nd, 2011 by Michael Meacher.The mood in the Commons was sober, worried, passive and resigned – not welcoming the dawn of a new era in the Middle East, but fearful that this could be the start of a third, long Western war against a Muslim state. A bloodbath in Benghazi had been avoided in the nick of time, a […]
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Above all, Labour should refuse bipartisan support for Tories on Libya (UPDATED)
Mar 21st, 2011 by Jon Lansman.Libya posed a real dilemma for Labour and the Left. On one hand, we want to support the Libyan revolution, to offer any possible protection to the civilian population and are bound therefore to be sympathetic to much if not all of the UN Security Council resolution, as Darrell Goodliffe argued here. On the other, with […]
