This is business as usual in international politics: you strike deals that your constituents don’t like or that are inconsistent with past rhetoric, ask the other side to cloak it in terms that are acceptable, and then feign outrage when things happen that you knew would happen when you struck the deal.
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Contain and Constrain Iran - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Even in slow motion, this is no game for amateurs
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the big loser from the Arab Spring has been Iran because the uprisings are about accountability and representation, which is precisely what the Iranian Revolution denied its authors after promising freedom. Nobody finds inspIration in the Iranian model.
What is Qatar doing in Syria? | Michael Stephens | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk - 1 views
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what of Qatar, a tiny Gulf state whose main strategic goal is to keep the Strait of Hormuz open so that it can export its liquefied natural gas across the world, bringing it untold riches? Syria plays no part in Qatar's strategic calculations, so why is Qatar getting so deeply entangled in a conflict into which even the great powers seem afraid to tread?
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Qatar, it seems, is driven in this particular endeavour by the force of the emir and his prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani. Both men feel that Qatar has a role to play in reconstructing the Arab world after the upheavals it has experienced. Wherever and whenever it can, Qatar then will seek to have an influence on the process of events in the region around it.
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here is my guess. The emir wants to secure a legacy for himself as the man who took the Arab world into a more activist phase of multilateral action. As the man who pushed a lethargic, divided region to stand up and solve Arab problems with Arab action, backed by the use of force for those who don't seem to get the message
Our Promised Land - 0 views
What's a funder to do? | openDemocracy - 0 views
Syria - a question of international law - 0 views
Samantha Power's case for striking Syria - 0 views
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Well worth 20 minutes. Whether or not one agrees, this is an admirably clear account of how we got here and the logic of compellent force in this instance, where deterrence has failed.
An Attack on Syria Isn't About Chemical Weapons | Political Violence @ a Glance - 0 views
Iran 'thwarts nuclear sabotage attempts' - Middle East - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
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"Several cases of industrial sabotage have been neutralized in the past few months before achieving the intended damage, including sabotage at a part of the IR-40 facility at Arak."
Simon Dalby, 400ppm: Anthropocene Geopolitics | Society and Space - Environment and Planning D - 1 views
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Humanity is remaking the biosphere; producing the new natures in which the human future will play out. Hence the now widespread use of the term Anthropocene for the period of planetary history in which the dominant ecological force is humanity, or more precisely, fossil fueled industrial capitalist humanity.
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Natural environments are no longer in any meaningful sense the given context for human existence; they are being remade by land use changes, urbanization and by both technologies and species moved and recombined in numerous artificial assemblages. Atlases with their designations of planetary biomes frequently need replacement with a dynamic cartography charting the changing “anthromes” that are the new terrestrial ecological patterns that matter.
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Globalization now has to be understood as a process of material transformation quite as much as a matter of trade, culture and politics crossing frontiers. The processes whereby business decisions are made to produce particular products by using certain technologies is key to understanding the future of the planet; economic geography has become essential to geomorphology.
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Your God-awful International Relations Hook of the Day | Daniel W. Drezner - 0 views
Syria isn't Kosovo and this isn't 1999. Not even close | openDemocracy - 0 views
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Useful contrast of the two cases, reflecting how careful one must be with historical analogies.
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