US Policy
Refusing Imperial Amnesia in the War on Terror
Twenty years after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the US invasion of Afghanistan, Darryl Li surveys how MERIP's deep and insightful coverage of the resulting War on Terror countered the "willful amnesia of American nationalism with a rigorous insistence on illuminating the historical continui
Selling Normalization in the Gulf
When the UAE and Bahrain normalized their relations with Israel, the countries' leaders justified their actions as beneficial to the Palestinian struggle for statehood. Elham Fakhro explains how this rationale quickly fell apart and shifted, revealing deeper economic and strategic goals. Fakhro also
The Fog of the Forever War with a Laugh Track in "United States of Al"
As President Joe Biden’s administration struggles to meet its self-imposed deadline of September 11, 2021 to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, Hollywood is offering its own painless, bloodless version of an end to America’s longest war. In this review of the CBS sitcom "United States of Al," the
Revisiting MERIP Coverage 30 Years After the First Gulf War
MERIP’s coverage of the First Gulf War sought to understand the crisis beyond the battlefield kinetics: from Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait to the US-led Desert Storm military operation liberating Kuwait and looking beyond to the regional aftermath. Our authors and editors offered historicall
Looking Beyond the Struggle for Palestinian Statehood
It is difficult to overstate the crisis in which Palestinians find themselves over 100 years after the Balfour Declaration and over 70 years after the Nakba. Palestinians are living as refugees without civil rights in places like Lebanon. Refugees who had lived in relative stability in Syria have now been
Consequences of US Financial Warfare in the Middle East
When the COVID-19 pandemic spiked in Iran in March 2020, calls for lifting financial restrictions to allow the import of much needed medical supplies fell on deaf ears in President Donald Trump’s administration. The White House had no intention of putting the brakes on an increasingly forceful tool of
The Enduring Lessons of the Iraq Sanctions
The economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations Security Council, from 1990 to 2003, may well lay claim to be the worst humanitarian catastrophe ever imposed in the name of global governance. The unconscionable human damage done by those sanctions is routinely dismissed as the unintended consequence of
The Tragedies and Dilemmas of US Intervention in Northeast Syria
At the very beginning of the Syrian uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Asad in 2011, and during the early stages of the slide into civil war, Washington made the serious miscalculation that the Asad regime would fall quickly. When the regime failed to collapse, it appeared that President