What are the issues facing the region left unresolved by President Obama’s visit?, asks Al Jazeera in this chapter’s presentation of its documentary EMPIRE. What exactly was the point of President Obama’s recent venture to the Middle East?
On the subject of Iran and how to deal with its aspiring nuclear capabilities, (in this documentary-debate) we hear the views of those most affected but very rarely heard at the same time in the same place.
As the recent Arab League summit in Doha showed, new alignments and new cartographies of power are being drawn across the Middle East – a region in flux that is underscoring the relative decline of one-time US domination.
With Israel scrambling to maintain its assumed nuclear and strategic pre-eminence, and the US keen to retain some authority in a Middle East where it dithered in responding to the uprisings of the Arab Spring, as it has on the crisis in Syria, Empire unpacks the rhetoric of Obama’s Israeli visit and dissects the real issues that the US President, Israel and the Arab world, urgently need to address.
This episode of Empire was broadcasted by AJEnglish from Sunday, March 31, 2013, at the following times GMT: Sunday: 2000; Monday: 1200; Tuesday: 0100; Wednesday: 0600. It was downloaded from YouTube on April 1.
To examine these crucial matters, AJ was joined by guests: Hillary Mann Leverett, co-author of Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms With the Islamic Republic, and in depth analysis from Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, columnist and author, currently editor-in-chief of the Bahrain based 24-hour Al Arab news channel; Mehran Kamrava, director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, and author of several books, including his most recent The Modern Middle East: A Political History since the First World War; Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for The Independent and author of numerous titles, including The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East; and Mohammad Marandi, assistant professor of English Literature at the University of Tehran and member of the North American Studies department.