Middle East Desk Update, July 22, 2010

AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEWS ON THE FOLLOWING TOPICS:
- EU endorses further sanctions against Iran
- US troop withdrawal from Iraq

ASLI BALI
Bali commented: "In the case of Iran, each new sanctions package has come to represent further evidence of the absence of a coherent and rational approach to an eminently containable threat. As sanctions have become an end in themselves, the drive for further such measures may serve to undermine any prospect for progress on the Iranian front, thereby also undermining the putative goals of the US and the EU."
Asli Bali is acting professor of law at the UCLA School of Law and an editor of Middle East Report. Her research focuses on public international law, comparative legal systems of the Middle East and civil and immigrants' rights in the United States.

CHRIS TOENSING
Toensing commented: “Many American boots may soon be off the ground of Iraq, but the US ethno-sectarian approach to Iraq has left a footprint that will be hard to erase. The current struggle to form Iraq’s government reveals that underneath the electoral rhetoric of national unity, Iraqi politics is clearly organized along ethno-sectarian lines. This was never the case in Iraq before the US invasion.”
Chris Toensing is executive director of MERIP and editor of Middle East Report.

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For more information, contact Bayann Hamid at (202) 223-3677 or at bhamid@merip.org.

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