World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

As the fighting in Gaza continues, both sides accuse each other of reprehensible tactics.  Both sides are taking actions that jeopardize the lives of civilians.   The rockets used by Hamas cannot be precisely targeted and therefore pose a risk to civilians; fortunately, no Israelis have yet been killed by the rockets.  Israel has more precisely guided weaponry and it takes very active steps to avoid civilian casualties.  But the Gaza Strip is very densely populated, and it is impossible to target any building without posing a risk to civilians; at this point, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed.  This asymmetry in deaths is striking, and it is a pattern that was true in previous conflicts between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.  Unfortunately, the US media is mostly based in Israel, and reports of the deaths of Palestinians is not generally covered.  It takes more effort to find out the damage done in the Gaza, but the effort is necessary to get an accurate view of the conflict.

Jessica Matthews has written a very good essay on the situation in Iraq which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books.  She analyzes many aspects of the current turmoil in Iraq, but she makes a very important point about how we should think about the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq: that the divide is really political and not religious at all:

The story, which has seemed to be all about religion and military developments, is actually mostly about politics: access to government revenue and services, a say in decision-making, and a modicum of social justice. True, one side is Sunni and the other Shia, but this is not a theological conflict rooted in the seventh century. ISIS and its allies have triumphed because the Sunni populations of Mosul and Tikrit and Fallujah have welcomed and supported them—not because of ISIS’s disgusting behavior, but in spite of it. The Sunnis in these towns are more afraid of what their government may do to them than of what the Sunni militia might. They have had enough of years of being marginalized while suffering vicious repression, lawlessness, and rampant corruption at the hands of Iraq’s Shia-led government.

A college education is very expensive, but its cost has traditionally been considered as an investment: college-educated people have traditionally made more money than those without a degree.  In recent years, however, some have begun to question the economic basis for the investment.  The calculation remains sound, but the underlying logic has changed.  The incomes of both college-educated and non-college-educated people are still diverging, but that’s because the incomes of non college-educated individuals have gone down sharply since 1991.  Indeed, the average income of a college-educated person is roughly the same as it was in 1991.