Middle East 
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SOURCE: The Baffler
1/18/2021
Operation Desert Shirt
Writer Matt Stieb examines the cultural reaction to the first Gulf War by studying the topical t-shirts of the day. Blithely invoked violence and casual bigotry silkscreened on cheap fabric should be a reminder of the cruelty inherent in war.
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12/20/2020
Peace is Good. But are More Peace Deals Necessarily Better?
by Catherine Baylin Duryea
The recent normalization of relations between Israel and Morocco extends longstanding covert cooperation between the two nations, but troublingly reflects Mideast politics that are increasingly aimed at isolating Iran. It also includes concessions that contribute to the marginalization of the people of Western Sahara.
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11/8/2020
Eisenhower’s Election Day Crisis Reminds Us What Presidents Must Do
by William Lambers
The Suez crisis reminds us that we need presidents who seek to avoid war, even above their political ambitions.
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11/1/2020
Trump Claims Credit for Defeating ISIS. Pentagon Documents Show Otherwise
by Brian Glyn Williams
A historian and scholar of the War on Terror says that Trump's claims of credit in the fight against ISIS are hot air.
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SOURCE: New York Times
8/24/2020
1,100-Year-Old Treasure Is Unearthed by Teenagers in Israel
The discovery offers clues to the relations between different empires that controlled the region centuries ago.
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SOURCE: New York Times
8/12/2020
Regrets? Even Brent Scowcroft Had a Few
In an oral history released after his death, the former national security adviser revealed a few key moments in which his ideas failed in the war against Saddam Hussein.
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SOURCE: Salon
8/17/2020
Trump's Dodgy Israel-UAE "Peace Deal" Smells like the Work of Henry Kissinger
by Jim Sleeper
Is the Israel-UAE agreement to open diplomatic relations an effort to marginalize the Palestinian Authority? Jim Sleeper argues it's the sort of thing Henry Kissinger would do.
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8/2/2020
30 Years Later: Saddam Hussein's Fateful Decision to Invade Kuwait
by Guy Laron
It was clear from the outset that this was a desperate gamble that put Iraq on a collision course with Washington. But Saddam believed he had no other choice but to stop Kuwait from dumping oil into a slack market.
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SOURCE: France 24
6/21/2020
Israeli Historian Zeev Sternhell, Advocate for Palestinian Rights, Dies at 85
Hebrew University president Asher Cohen hailed Sternhell, a professor emeritus there who was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for political science in 2008, as "among the most important researchers" to emerge from the institution.
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6/14/2020
Israel and the Palestinians: Architects of Their Own Destruction
by Alon Ben-Meir
The political positions of Israeli and Palestinian leadership set the region on a path toward more bloodshed.
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SOURCE: New York Times
5/7/2020
Daniel Pipes Argues Annexing the West Bank Would Hurt Israel
Daniel Pipes, prominent conservative American commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, gives six reasons to believe that taking over Palestinian territory would harm both U.S.-Israel relations and Israel’s status as the Jewish state.
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4/17/2020
The Saudis, the Jews, and FDR's Dog: The Opening of the US-Saudi Relationship
by Rafael Medoff
Recent commemorations of FDR's diplomatic meeting with King Abdul Aziz in 1945 obscure unsavory aspects of the origins of the US-Saudi relationship.
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SOURCE: The New York Times
4/6/2020
Will the Virus Trigger a Second Arab Spring?
The coronavirus outbreak is likely to bring into focus the legitimacy and governance deficit of troubled Middle Eastern regimes.
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2/16/20
A Gallon of Talk and a Teaspoon of Action, Then Label the Problem "Insolvable" and Plan Another Conference
by Robert Scott Kellner
What shall it avail, the latest speech-laden conference on this topic, when seventy-five years of intensive Holocaust education had no effect on Holocaust deniers and could not stop the resurgence of the virulent anti-Semitism that had infected Germany one hundred years ago?
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2/13/20
The Travesty of the Century
by Alon Ben-Meir
Whereas the US has over the years played a central role in the effort to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no American administration has provided such a detailed proposal, certainly not one that grants Israel all of its wish list.
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SOURCE: Al Jazeera
2/11/20
America held hostage
by David Marks
Forty years after the Iran hostage crisis, its impact endures.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
2/5/20
The United States and Saudi Arabia aren’t allies. They never have been.
by Ellen R. Wald
One of our key ideas about the Middle East is wrong.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
2/5/20
How the US repeatedly failed to support reform movements in Iran
by Pardis Mahdavi
For 40 years, the relationship between the U.S. and Iran has been marked by disagreement – but also by a series of missed opportunities.
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2/2/20
Israel as Palestine: One State is Not the Solution, It’s Reality
by Ian S. Lustick
The struggle for peace between Israel and the Palestinians has been replaced by struggles, likely to take generations, for the equalityof Jews and Arabs within the state now known as Israel.
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SOURCE: BBC History Extra
1/21/20
Tension in the Middle East and populist presidents: what the world was like 100 years ago
by David Charlwood
Violent uprisings in the Middle East and a populist US president vowing to put “America First”. Historian David Charlwood looks back 100 years to the global situation of 1920 and finds remarkable parallels with the present.
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