Portside

Many actions, many ideas in a week of crisis

With oil prices down and wealthy countries bungling COVID-19, the pandemic has exposed the weaknesses that wealth papers over. The relationship between wealth and favorable outcomes only works when that wealth is invested in the many, not the few.

Since 2011, Arab labor organizations and left parties have been central to movements for democracy and social justice in the Middle East. Frequently overlooked in Western media coverage...they’ve carried on this fight against tremendous odds.

Of course, if the United States and/or Israel join in, Iran will be hard pressed. But as belligerent as Bolton and the Israeli government are toward Iran, would they initiate or join a war? But we should take neocons like Bolton at their word.

This draws on articles about the 1991 Gulf War the author wrote which drew on the writer's extensive research for her 2008 novel, "When You Come Home" (Curbstone)-- which chronicles the lives of young veterans returning home from Desert Storm.

Saudi Arabia's puzzling effort to blacklist its tiny neighbor Qatar begs the question of who's really isolated in the Gulf. The attack on Qatar is part of Saudi Arabia’s aggressive new foreign policy that is being led by Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman. As Saudi Arabia’s “monarch in waiting,” Mohammed has launched a disastrous war in Yemen that’s killed more than 10,000 civilians and sparked a country-wide cholera epidemic there.

In the looming second Iran-Iraq War, the US will be de facto allied with Iran against the would-be al-Qaeda affiliate (ISIS was rejected by core al-Qaeda for viciously attacking other militant vigilante Sunni fundamentalists in turf wars in Syria). In fact, since ISIS is allegedly bankrolled by private Salafi businessmen in Kuwait and elsewhere in the Oil Gulf, the US is on the opposite side of all its former allies of the 1980s.