Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

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Fred Halliday

Fred Halliday (1946-2010) was a long-time contributing editor of this magazine and a professor at the London School of Economics.

MER Article

Iran and the Middle East

The external relations of the Islamic Republic of Iran are, in large measure, dependent on politics within that country, and on the slow and often interrupted process of post-revolutionary change which Iran is undergoing two decades after the fall of the Shah. As has been widely reported over the past

Fred Halliday • 16 min read

MER Article

Letter from Kuwait

Some ten years after a sudden, brutal occupation, Kuwait gives, at first sight, the appearance of having returned to normal. Virtually all the damage done to buildings has been repaired, the oilfields are functioning and the state has normal diplomatic relations even with states such as Jordan, Yemen and Sudan

Fred Halliday • 9 min read

MER Article

The Middle East at the Millennial Turn

Any attempt to summarize the direction of the Middle East at the cusp of the Millennium is hazardous indeed: We should long ago have resisted the temptation to see the region as a single, integrated political or socio-economic whole, or to reduce what are, perhaps now more than ever, contradictory r

Fred Halliday • 11 min read

MER Article

Arabia Without Sultans Revisited

For an author to revisit a book he wrote a quarter of a century, and a half lifetime ago, is a perilous undertaking. Arabia Without Sultans was conceived of, and written, in the early 1970s, and published in 1974 in Britain, in 1975 in the US, and subsequently, in Arabic,

Fred Halliday • 10 min read

MER Article

Washington Watch

House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Lee Hamilton (D-IN) offered the first criticism by a Washington insider of the Bush administration’s handling of the Gulf crisis when, on September 18, 1990, he blamed Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs John Kelly for not sending

Fred Halliday • 4 min read

MER Article

A Military Solution Will Destroy Kuwait

Ahmad al-Khatib has been active for many years in the Kuwaiti opposition movement and was a member of Kuwait’s parliament until its dissolution in 1986. Al-Khatib attended the assembly of Kuwaitis in Jidda, called by the ruling Al Sabah, in October 1990. Fred Halliday spoke with him in London upon h

Fred Halliday • 5 min read

MER Article

Tunisia's Uncertain Future

The first months after Habib Bourguiba’s overthrow in November 1987 witnessed an ambiguous honeymoon between the new regime and the Islamists. Bourguiba himself was under a form of house arrest in Monastir, his native town. Squares named after his birthday, August 3, 1903, were renamed November 7, t

Fred Halliday • 9 min read

MER Article

The Revolution's First Decade

It is now ten years since the triumph of the Iranian revolution and the assumption of power by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his forces on February 11, 1979. If the revolution itself was a surprise, destroying an apparently strong and capable regime and bringing a most unexpected clerical leadersh

Fred Halliday • 9 min read

MER Article

Letter from Dublin

As in nearly all Western European countries, there are those in Ireland who would have us believe that their country has a special relationship with the Middle East. Some of this has to do with trade, some with the sharing of enemies. But the affinities of Ireland with the Middle East, these Irish c

Fred Halliday • 6 min read

MER Article

Lessing, The Wind Blows Away Our Words

Doris Lessing, The Wind Blows Away Our Words (London: Picador and NY: Random House, 1987). The travel book that touches on the political is a tricky genre. At its best it enables the author, freed from the constraints of formal narrative and factual analysis, to present a special insight into a

Fred Halliday • 2 min read

MER Article

Moscow's Crisis Management

In January 1986, a major crisis broke out within the leadership of the Yemeni Socialist Party, the ruling party in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. In two weeks of fighting many thousands of people lost their lives, and afterward between 30,000 and 70,000 fled to neighboring North Yemen.

Fred Halliday • 16 min read

MER Article

The Great Powers and the Middle East

The December 1987 Reagan-Gorbachev summit raised once again the issue of linkage between Third World conflicts and East-West relations. Two broad questions are involved. First, how does the nuclear arms race intersect with social and political upheaval in the Third World? The second question involve

Fred Halliday • 10 min read