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 […]
Tag Archives: Middle East
The escalating battle between Israel and Hamas has raised questions as well as tensions. With the Middle East in a state of flux, why did Israel strike at Hamas military leader? More importantly, why did Hamas respond in a way sure to invite an Israeli attack that it could not possibly fend off? While Hamas’ […]
Australia recently signed a deal with the United Arab Emirates to provide uranium for the Persian Gulf country’s planned nuclear power plants. In an email interview, Fethi Mansouri, the director of the Center for Citizenship and Globalization at Deakin University, Australia, and the author of “Australia and the Middle East: a Frontline Relationship,” discussed Australia-Middle […]
When Gilad Shalit was dragged away in a cross-border raid in June 2006, it’s doubtful he or his captors would have imagined five years’ of negotiations lay ahead. Nor in their most fevered imaginings would they have expected 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, some of them with multiple life sentences for murder, would be the price of […]
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. […]
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 […]