Category: U.S. Foreign Policy
[This article will appear in the forthcoming summer 2012 print issue of New Politics.]
CPD’s statement "End U.S. Support for Bahrain’s Repressive Government" was signed by more than 1900 people, including several hundred Bahrainis, and was widely circulated in this country and Bahrain.
Since the beginning of 2011, Israeli politicians, generals, and diplomats displayed a growing nervousness in anticipation of "September," i.e., the proclaimed Palestinian intention to seek a full United Nations Membership for the State of Palestine.
Barack Obama took office three years ago on a euphoric wave of aspirations.
[Reprinted from the History News Network.]
[This is a revised version of a talk given at a conference sponsored by Students for Justice in Palestine held at Columbia University, October 14-16, 2011.]
The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen on Friday by a U.S. drone has elicited cheers from most mainstream politicians and pundits. Civil libertarians, however, have noted the terrible precedent this sets: here an American citizen has been targeted for assassination and executed solely on the say-so of the president, with no need to indict him, or present open evidence of his guilt. If the U.S. government had wanted to tap al-Awlaki’s phone, judicial review would have been required.
The United States’ status as some form of imperial power is scarcely disputed on the Left. Richard Immerman’s Empire for Liberty: A History of America from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz is not a book written particularly for or from the Left, yet in some respects it goes further in defense of this idea than many leftists have allowed.
Over the past several weeks, Bard College and I as its president have been the object of unsubstantiated, exaggerated, and often vitriolic accusations regarding a student group on campus that has chosen to affiliate itself with an organization called the International Solidarity Movement. Some of those who have posted on blogs and written emails claim that ISM is a "terrorist" organization committed to the destruction of the State of Israel and its people.
The Campaign for Peace and Democracy issued two statements on June 9, one on the movement for democracy in Syria and the other on Israel’s brutal response to unarmed demonstrators.
CPD Salutes Syria’s Courageous Democratic Movement
June 9, 2011
IN 1961, DWIGHT D. EISENHOWERwarned about the dangers of capitalized war, how the military-industrial complex was already taking on a life all its own, and the single-minded quest for profit—a virtue under capitalism — would continue to drive weapons companies to exert an untold influence upon politicians. Since that time, the war-making apparatus has expanded both in size and in kind, with ever more partners joining in on the enterprise.
Ngo Van’s memoir of "those other movements and revolts caught in the crossfire between the French and the Stalinists" in the years before the American commitment in Vietnam reminded me, painfully, of an "editorial" I wrote on the fall of Saigon.
THE EXPECTATIONS FOR CHANGE in U.S. policy toward Latin America when Barack Obama was elected president seemed as high among most governments and citizens of Latin America as the expectations of the voters in the United States who cast their ballots for him. Many analysts believed that the relationship between the region and the United States had reached a new low point during the two terms of Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush.
NEW YORK, N.Y., May 24 2011 — In a response that surprised U.S. organizers of a campaign calling on the United States government to repudiate its partnership with the Al Khalifa regime in Bahrain, hundreds of people from Bahrain joined in signing the Campaign for Peace and Democracy’s launching statement “End U.S. Support for Bahrain’s Repressive Government.”
[Editor's note: This article continues Richard Greeman's series about Islamism.] Over the years, the British-backed Moslem Brotherhood’s activities spread far beyond Egypt. Not by coincidence did the first Arabic translation of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” still in circulation today, appear in Egypt the 1920"s. This anti-Semitic forgery was created by the Imperial Russian secret services around 1905 in order to designate a scapegoat and divert the growing Russian revolutionary movement into reactionary channels (pogroms, Black Hundreds).
The basic issue for socialists in confronting the Libyan situation is this: we wish Qaddafi to be defeated, but we are not indifferent to who defeats him. That is because who defeats Qaddafi involves how the regime is brought down and the consequences of that downfall. We are not in support of capitalist imperialism being the agent of that defeat, even though almost any conceivable regime that replaces Qaddafi would most likely be a “lesser evil” to this, one of the world’s most horrific police states.
The left discussion on Libya has been informed by very few of the Middle East’s anti-imperialist voices. In an article posted on ZNet, I present extended excerpts from a March 19 speech by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon’s Hizbullah, on the Libyan uprising, the Arab revolts, and the role of the West.
The Libyan intervention has challenged many on the Left. Of course there are those who cheer U.S. foreign policy everywhere and those who think Qaddafi is a left hero. But for those who reject both these points of view, the Libyan situation has still been very difficult to sort out. Mike Albert and I wrote a question and answer offering our views.
We Support the Libyan Democratic Revolution and
Oppose Western Military Intervention and Domination
By Thomas Harrison and Joanne Landy
Co-Directors, Campaign for Peace and Democracy
April 6, 2011
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