Current Analysis Kerry on Israel: Me Too In a May 3 address to the Anti-Defamation League's National Leadership Conference, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry reiterated his steadfast support for Israel and assured attendees that, if elected, he would never force Israel to negotiate without a “credible partner.” Statem Catherine Cook • 4 min read
Current Analysis Military Families Feel Betrayed by Administration For everyone except George W. Bush and his entourage, the recent siege of Falluja and the standoff with the militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr gave occasion to rethink the conventional wisdom about the US-led occupation of Iraq. Chris Toensing • 4 min read
Current Analysis The Guantánamo "Black Hole" Since January 2002, over 700 persons from 42 different countries have been detained without charge or right to counsel by the United States at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. While many detainees were captured by the US on battlefields in Afghanistan in late 2001, an unknown number of others were delivered Scott Cutler Shershow, Scott Michaelsen • 11 min read
Current Analysis To Deny Iran Atomic Weapons, Create a Nuclear-Free Region The 12-year standoff between Saddam Hussein’s former regime and the US displayed a circular logic: the Iraqi refusal to “come clean” about possibly non-existent weaponry simultaneously fed, and fed off of, Washington’s belligerence toward Iraq. With most eyes on the denouement of that malign symbios Chris Toensing • 3 min read
MER Article From Nuremberg to Guantánamo All that is needed to achieve total political domination is to kill the juridical in humankind. -- Hannah Arendt, On the Origins of Totalitarianism In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the US, George W. Bush used terms like "punishment" and "justice" to assert Lisa Hajjar • 18 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Winter 2003) "If Saddam had nuclear weapons, Iraq's geographic location at the head of the Persian Gulf would allow him to threaten the destruction of a number of targets of great importance to the United States. The Saudi oilfields are a particularly worrisome target." These lines do not The Editors • 5 min read
Current Analysis Iraqi Food Security in Hands of Occupying Powers After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the UN Security Council's imposition of comprehensive economic sanctions upon Iraq, the former Iraqi government assembled a food ration database, which was later expanded under the UN's so-called Oil for Food program. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Iraqi Shiite Nathaniel Hurd • 11 min read
Current Analysis Strings and the Global Gulliver Inaugurating the 2003 session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, Secretary-General Kofi Annan sounded the alarm about the UN's future in the face of US unilateralism. The world has "come to a fork in the road…a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, Ian Williams • 11 min read
Current Analysis Never Too Soon to Say Goodbye to Hi Despite its deepening troubles in Iraq, the Bush administration maintains an audaciously upbeat outward mien. From George W. Bush’s macho landing on an aircraft carrier in May to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s victory lap around the Mesopotamian battlefields in September, the song Washington si Elliott Colla, Chris Toensing • 18 min read
MER Article From the Editor (Fall 2003) August 2003 was a cruel month. Parties still unknown detonated a car bomb outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, killing 17 Iraqis. Two weeks later, an unclaimed truck bomb devastated the UN headquarters in the Iraqi capital, killing 23 people, including UN Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello. On the The Editors • 4 min read
Current Analysis Hi, and a Low at the State Department As America’s standing with the Arab public continues to drop, many Americans ask just what the world’s greatest democracy must do to improve its image. The latest US venture in public diplomacy, a glossy monthly called Hi, is an exercise in American earnestness designed to answer precisely that ques Chris Toensing • 3 min read
Current Analysis Behind the Baker Plan for Western Sahara On July 31, 2003, the UN Security Council voted to "support strongly" former Secretary of State James Baker's proposals for resolving the Western Sahara dispute, the last Africa file remaining open at the UN Decolonization Committee. Baker has been the personal envoy of UN Secretary-General Kofi Ann Toby Shelley • 9 min read
