Author Archives: Benjamin Isakhan

What Australia owes Iraq 10 years after the war began

The 10-year anniversary of the Iraq war serves as a unique opportunity to measure the costs of the intervention, to assess the successes and failures of the goals of the war and to assess Australia’s obligations. Let’s start with the costs. According to official figures, 4486 US military and 319 other coalition troops died during […]

The Middle East should not adopt Western democracy

In order for democracy to really take hold in the wake of the recent Arab Revolutions, the people of the region should be careful not to conform to Western ideas of democracy and instead develop their own model, one relevant to their own cultural norms and in tune with their own rich history of democracy. […]

Australia's Mideast relationship is easy as 1,2,3

Although Australia has repeatedly expressed its solidarity and support with the Arab uprisings and has called for a no-fly zone to be imposed on Libya, what exactly Australia should learn from the popular democratic movements sweeping across the region has yet to be considered. The dramatic sequence of pro-democracy movements that are emerging in the […]