MER Article Arab Economics After the Gulf War On February 6, 1991, Secretary of State James Baker admitted before the House of Foreign Affairs Committee that economic factors, particularly widespread Arab resentment that oil wealth was not more equitably distributed, had played a role in the dynamics leading to the Gulf war and would remain one Yahya Sadowski • 15 min read
MER Article The Gulf Crisis and the New World Order The Gulf crisis cannot be regarded as a purely local or regional issue, or a crisis whose worldwide significance is derived only from the importance of Arab oil. More fundamentally, it has become the main testing ground for the rapprochement between East and West as applied to North-South relations. Mohamed Sid-Ahmed • 4 min read
MER Article A New Balance of Forces Samih Farsoun, a contributing editor of this magazine and professor of sociology at American University, recently visited the Middle East. He spoke with Joe Stork in early November 1990. What is your assessment of the impact of this crisis on the balance of forces in the region? Joe Stork • 9 min read
MER Article Who's Afraid of Bureaustroika? At a dinner party in Damascus, our Lebanese host referred enthusiastically to Soviet perestroika, saying: “We Arabs could reap many benefits from it.” A case at hand was his new restaurant in Moscow. Thanks to the good old days when the Communist Party of the USSR used to ladle out scholarships to m Isam al-Khafaji • 13 min read
MER Article Continuity and Change in Soviet Policy The day after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and US Secretary of State James Baker announced what they termed “an unusual step.” They issued a communique “jointly urging the international community to join them and suspend all supplies of arms to Iraq on an in Alain Gresh • 18 min read
Consequences of Perestroika Arab progressives tend to view the changes initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika as harmful to the cause of Arab national liberation. One leading pan-Arab statesman privately described the rapprochement between East and West as portending the disintegration of the Communist bloc and the total Mohamed Sid-Ahmed • 6 min read
MER Article Sharabi, Neopatriarchy Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Values in Arab Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.) Peter Gran • 3 min read
MER Article Column These days the mainstream media in the US generally thinks twice before publishing crude slurs against entire ethnic or racial groups. But there remain those whom it is still apparently respectable to denigrate, foremost among them Arabs and Iranians. Al Miskin • 3 min read
MER Article The Uprooted Cinema My friend Jacques got as far as a screenplay when he died. He was Palestinian (Armenian) from Jerusalem, a photographer by trade, and after his family moved from occupation to Australia, Jacques made his way to the States on a tourist visa. Settling in New York, he found work in a series of custom p Miriam Rosen • 13 min read
MER Article Conflicts and Crossroads On February 16, 1989, the leaders of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and North Yemen signed an agreement forming the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC), a four-country economic trading bloc, and expressed the hope that it would lead to an Arab common market. On the same day, the leaders of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia Mohamed Sid-Ahmed • 4 min read
MER Article Lamb, The Arabs David Lamb, The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage (New York: Random House, 1987). More accessible than academic or political studies, journalism has long been the vehicle for most popular knowledge of the Middle East. Recently, with the increase in the number of foreign correspondents writing full- Lee OBrien • 1 min read
MER Article Peterson, Defending Arabia J. E. Peterson, Defending Arabia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). Fred H. Lawson • 1 min read
