Hazem Saghieh

Hazem Saghieh

On the Scandal and Capitalism  

Since the Jeffrey Epstein scandal sent shockwaves around the world, many Western critics have warned that something has gone profoundly wrong, and that capitalism, in its contemporary form, bears much of the blame for the deterioration of politics, values, and morality. Accordingly, some outlets…

Awaiting ‘False Prophets’!

In times of transition, when everything is in flux as uncertainty and apprehension prevail, bewildering the mind and rendering it incapable of processing the strange and uncanny hotchpotches popping up everywhere, superstition and fraud become widespread, with an exponential rise in the number of…

The Arguments For and Against Intervention in Iran

In addressing the question of Iran and how to deal with it, Some believe that two major historical events should guide the actions of the present conduct. The first is the coup that overthrew Mossadegh’s government in 1953. At the time, Britain’s ire with nationalization of Iran’s oil fields…

Iran and a Few Questions of the Imperial Inclination

Many things have changed in Iran over its modern history, but one thing has not changed: its imperial consciousness and inclination. The country’s name changed in 1935, and what had been “Persia” became “Iran,” and it then became an “Islamic Republic” in 1979. Throughout, the balance of the state…

Do Neither Resistance Nor Friendship Work?

Traditionally, the strongest response to those who argue that resistance represents a bulwark against “Israel’s ambitions” was that diplomacy and friendships would protect Lebanon from such “ambitions” and also from similar challenges. During the brief civil war of 1958, for example, arms that the …

Changes to How the 'Revolution' Is Conceived

It is a sign of the times that the word “revolution” now refers to something different from what it once did. The term does not, in this brief column, imply any prior value judgment, be it negative or positive, nor does it carry any of the connotations that various ideologies have assigned to it. …

A Transitional Phase that We Want Obscure

It seems all but certain that the Levant, and Iran, are turning the page on the defiance era. As well as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime, the regime in Tehran is itself on the precipice of a decisive phase that threatens its survival, while Iraq finds itself compelled to reconsider its…

On International Law and the Model

Two voices have been rumbled globally since the Venezuelan event: one questions the need for international law as such, with the negative answer implied in the question, and the other loudly decries its absence with feigned innocence. The law is a process of contention and a framework assessed…

Regarding the Caracas Operation…

While it goes without saying that political phenomena are linked to domestic factors in the countries and regions where they emerge, it is also true that external shared and reciprocal factors also help explain those phenomena and their dynamics. The fact is that the kidnapping of Venezuelan…

Is There Life Beyond the Centralized Nation-State?

Borrowing the opening lines of Marx and Engels' famous “Communist Manifesto,” we could say that the specter of rethinking the state is haunting the Arab region. The number of states whose unity is being contested continues to rise. The regional context within which each of these movements is…