Posts tagged : "United States"

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: On December 6, the mayor of Tehran, Alireza Zakani, was the special speaker at the Sharif University of Technology in a ceremony to mark Students Day. He was one of several conservative ideologues deployed to university campuses by the Iranian government to initiate dialogue with students and placate them as the nationwide protests triggered by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini in September showed no sign of abating. Universities were particular hotbeds of protest and activism. While the authorities consummated a campaign of mass arrests, sham trials and violence on the streets, they also touted “dialogue.” They made a stab at appealing to young people through speeches like the one...

Kourosh Ziabari - Foreign Policy: Progressive commentators in the United States who once championed U.S. President Joe Biden and touted his appetite for multilateralism as an advantage of his foreign policy are now openly criticizing the president for his Middle East approach. Specifically, they say it’s reminiscent of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s agenda and failed legacy in the region, epitomized by his catastrophic withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The argument is that Biden squandered moderate former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s final months in power in 2021 to finalize a JCPOA revival while a breakthrough was imminent and that he is...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: Many residents of Minneapolis, Minnesota, cross over the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge every day or move past it. It offers a unique vantage point to the well-liked Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, epitomised by the iconic $500,000 Spoonbridge and Cherry sculptural design. Most of the locals recognise Whitney, a Twin Cities philanthropist and civic leader who was married to the 1980 Independent-Republican gubernatorial candidate Wheelock Whitney and passed away in 1986. But to many Minnesota denizens and visitors of the Garden who happen to walk over the bridge spanning an interstate highway, or at least catch a glimpse of it from afar, the story behind the structure is almost undisclosed, unless one is...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: In today's irreversibly globalised world, international travelling and mobility are not merely deemed a privilege, but a fundamental entitlement the informed and probing citizens of the 21st century assertively expect the governments to provide. To a large extent, the power of the passports people hold illustrates the standing of their countries in the community of nations, the shades of respectful treatment they receive while away from home, and in many cases, the boundaries of their freedoms and prerogatives. Last October, the London-headquartered global citizenship and residence advisory firm Henley & Partners published its quarterly repertoire of the most desirable passports in terms of their...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: Withdrawing from the internationally-celebrated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, extolled by every major democratic leader in the world at the time it was signed, was not only a foreign policy blunder on behalf of the former US President Donald Trump but a catastrophic betrayal of years of painstaking efforts to resolve one of the intractable dilemmas of international relations and the instigation of a critical nuclear proliferation risk. When the JCPOA was agreed, the EU high commissioner for foreign policy Federica Mogherini said it could "open the way to a new chapter in international relations." Trump wreaked havoc on that opening. But instead of filling the void ensuing that misstep by...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s aversion to the United States, which progressively morphed into an antagonism toward the collective geopolitical reality known as the West, was one of the founding precepts of the 1979 movement that gave birth to the Islamic Republic. Followers of Middle East politics know well how the US support for Iran’s deposed Shah and how the hostage crisis alienated the two former allies that had rarely wavered in their commitment to each other’s security and prosperity since they established diplomatic relations in 1883. But the induction of the world’s first Islamic Republic in Iran not only upended that decades-long conviviality, but unleashed a new period of blind enmity that only worsened...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As US troops quickly withdraw after 20 years of war in Afghanistan, regional powers are moving to fill the emerging power vacuum in a country long bedeviled by lethal internal rivalries. Iran, the top trading partner of Afghanistan and an influential neighbor with high stakes in its stability, has engaged both the Afghan government and Taliban insurgents in recent months. This comes even though many Iranians have decried their government’s overtures to the Taliban as treacherous considering the group’s track record of sponsoring violence and terrorism including in Iran. The US troop withdrawal has already created massive reverberations across Afghanistan. The Taliban have recently claimed to...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: The tragic killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, by a former Minnesota police officer on May 25, was not the first instance of white cops resorting to undue force against Black citizens, but was certainly egregious enough that made the American people’s blood boil, sparking massive protests in the United States from coast to coast, prompting demonstrations in some 30 countries against racism and police brutality. The killing of George Floyd was exposed and went viral owing to the videos captured by bystanders who were witnessing the law enforcement officer Derek Chauvin applying a neck restraint on the unarmed man for nearly 9 minutes when he was put under arrest after Floyd was...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: A convoluted conflict that has triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the war in Yemen is now in its seventh year, with a staggering death toll of more than 100,000 and dire economic repercussions that have made life in the most impoverished Arab nation additionally painful. International efforts to extinguish the conflict have so far made little success and humanitarian assistance is supplied with great difficulty. Nearly 24 million Yemenis, constituting four fifths of the entire population, require urgent humanitarian aid. A child dies every 10 minutes due to malnutrition or disease, and the country’s health sector, reeling from a massive loss of human capital and demolition of infrastructure,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Nearly 73 years after it began to unleash havoc on the Middle East, little has changed in the dynamics of the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. World powers and international organizations seem to have thrown in the towel, conceding that they are incapable of remedying the impasse, and as time goes by, diplomacy and fence-mending prove more evasive. In the final days of the US administration of Donald Trump, the dawning of the Abraham Accords, through which a handful of Arab countries initiated diplomatic relations with Israel, offered solace to the Jewish state, boosting its foothold at the doorstep of its arch-nemesis, Iran. To the Palestinians scrambling for sovereignty, though, the...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: After dragging their feet on how to kick off the elusive process of resurrecting the moribund Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iranian government and the Biden administration are now involved in a fresh round of diplomatic efforts to sew up the full compliance of all parties with the deal terms. The Austrian capital Vienna is hosting delegations from Iran and six world powers, moderated by the European Union, where shuttle diplomacy and painstaking negotiations to revive the debilitated Iran deal started on Tuesday and are expected to continue until Friday. Iran, the trio of France, Germany and the United Kingdom, as well as China and Russia, meet at the Grand Hotel Vienna. The US...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s was one of the most traumatic episodes of the 20th century for Iranians. While a new governmental system was being crystallized in a turbulent social context in the wake of a revolution, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein waged an all-out internecine war against his fragile neighbor, inflicted unspeakable human suffering on the people of Iran and razed the country’s infrastructure to the ground. The goal was to nip the fledgling Islamist movement spearheaded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the bud and prevent revolutionary Iran from emerging as a force of hostility against the Arab states of the Persian Gulf region and the alliance of Western powers. Described as...