Making sense of the elections (in Iran)

William Beeman, an anthropologist at Brown who has published about the US-Iranian relationship, has an excellent post about the recent Iranian elections. Most of the major newspapers have had articles about the elections being a referendum on Ahmadinejad, but the analysis of the results has been minimal. Beeman looks closely at the [...]

Sectarian Conflict, Civil War, American Occupation, or Iranian Threat?

A few weeks ago I posted links to article about the sectarian differences in Iraq. (Here and here). The supposed sectarian divide in Iraq is still constantly showing up in much of the mainstream American press. Fortunately, a few bloggers are trying to draw attention to the gross oversimplification of Iraq as divided [...]

Iraq’s oil

The report this week from the Iraq Study Group has been the talk of the town. It seems that every major media person has commented on the report. Most of the discussion seems to focus on the group’s open acknowledgment of Bush’s failures in Iraq and the need to be open to international [...]

Understanding Saudi Arabia and ARAMCO

If you have any interest in understanding the origins of the oil industry in Saudi Arabia, take a look at this discussion about Robert Vitalis’ new book, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. The forum includes a brief overview by the author, and responses by Gregory Gause (University of Vermont) and [...]

Another one bites the dust…

Things are not looking good for the Bush administration. Today the President announced that John Bolton’s days in the UN are over. Not surprisingly, there were not enough votes in the Senate for the nomination to pass.

My favorite part about the end of Bolton’s days in the UN was the comment [...]

You know it’s bad…

You know it’s bad when even Donald Rumsfeld is calling for a change in policy in Iraq.  Two days before he “resigned,” Rumsfeld wrote the awkwardly titled “Iraq – Illustrative New Courses of Action,” in which he acknowledged that the US strategy in Iraq is not working and “in my view it is time for [...]