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Realignments In The Middle East And Africa Featuring Isa Blumi

by | Oct 22, 2021 |

Great interview of Isa Blumi by Joanne Leon. Isa reviews in detail the realignment of power with the change from Trump to Biden, the fight for natural resources, trade routes and influence in the Middle East and Africa.

Guest: Dr. Isa Blumi. This is a wide-ranging discussion about the political realignments in the Gulf states, new partnerships in the Middle East and Africa, Qatar’s involvement in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, developments in Yemen, quiet military repurposing of strategic island of Socotra, the long and complicated exploitation of East Africa, the Red Sea region and Horn of Africa, the mass of military bases in Djbouti, the Turkey-Russia relationship and more.

For those listening to the audio version of this podcast, we have added many maps and other visual enhancements to the video version that you might find helpful during some of this discussion so if you are interested you can find those versions on Youtube and Rokfin right now and other video platforms in the not too distant future.

Dr. Isa Blumi is an historian, an author and Professor of Global History, Islamic World, Ottoman Empire, Yemen, Albania. His most recent Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World tells the story of the wars in Yemen but also “ultimately tells an even larger story of today’s political economy of global capitalism, development, and the war on terror as disparate actors intersect in Arabia.”  He also authored the book Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World

FOLLOW Isa Blumi @IsaBlumi and find his work at Google Scholar and his latest book at UCPress.edu.

Around the Empire aroundtheempire.com is listener supported, independent media.

RIP Colin Powell

by | Oct 18, 2021 | ,

Should Generals be Diplomats?

“Retired General Colin Powell was appointed US Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, and you may recall his colorful powerpoint presentation before the UN General Assembly in the run-up to the 2003 war on Iraq—yellow cake, aluminium tubes, mobile chemical laboratories (think: Breaking Bad). Powell did not convince very many of his colleagues at the UN that Iraq needed to be invaded in order to thwart Saddam Hussein’s allegedly imminent transfer of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to Al Qaeda, but the US government went to war anyway. Why? Because the Bush administration wanted to, and UK Prime Minister Tony “Poodle” Blair had pledged that he was “absolutely” with Bush, “no matter what”. (See the Chilcot Report and its implications.) Even more important than having a tiny “coalition of the willing” was the congressional conferral on Bush of the 2002 AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force), giving him the liberty to wage war on Iraq as he saw fit and at a time of his choosing. The rest is history.”

full article from We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age blog

RIP Abdulrahman al-Awlaki

by | Oct 14, 2021 | ,

RIP Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a sixteen-year-old U.S. citizen killed in Yemen on this day in 2011 by a missile launched from a U.S. drone. “We murdered some folks.”

thedroneage.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/we-

The Monopoly Of Violence

by | Oct 13, 2021 |

Not to be confused with “The Monopoly On Violence”.

In this stimulating, sometimes shocking, and altogether powerful documentary about police violence in contemporary France, filmmaker and journalist David Dufresne examines the ways in which a government justifies brutal acts against its own citizens. Taking its title from sociologist and political economist Max Weber, who wrote that the state establishes a “monopoly on violence” by claiming the legitimate use of force, Dufresne’s film mixes footage of attacks on protestors—largely of the gilet jaunes, or “yellow vest,” political movement—and interviews with intellectuals, police officers, and victims of police assault. The Monopoly of Violence is an essential and timely work, showing the dangers of police serving the state rather than the people, and identifying the growing tendency among Western democracies to enact totalitarian methods to keep the populace under their control.

 

It Is In Our DNA

by | Oct 13, 2021 |

Damage control

2021 10 13 05 14

Bipartisan support for Israel is a source of pride in Congress, US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said in a meeting with Foreign Minister Yair Lapid on Tuesday.

“It is a privilege to talk about the importance of the US-Israel bond, one based on our mutual security, mutual values, and is again something that is a source of pride to all of us in the Congress who work on this,” Pelosi said.

Support for Israel “has always been bipartisan in the Congress of the US and continues to be so,” she stated.

Pelosi said that when her father, Rep. Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. of Maryland, was in Congress, he pushed then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt to support the establishment of a Jewish state. D’Alesandro was a supporter of the Bergson Group, affiliated with the Irgun, which lobbied the Roosevelt administration to save the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.

“For many of us, it is in our DNA,” Pelosi said of support for Israel.

More here

 

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