Middle East Articles

"Major Shane Reeves is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law at the United States Military Academy and Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy Marsh is an Assistant Professor and Senior Military Faculty member in the Department of Law at the United States Air Force Academy.  Prior to these assignments, both taught as Associate Professors for the International and Operational Law Department at The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, Charlottesville, VA.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the official positions of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Air Force, or the Judge Advocate General's Corps of either service."

Many have challenged the legality of the 2011 United States’ operations that resulted in the deaths of Osama Bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki.  Pakistan condemned the Bin Laden operation as a violation of international law; human rights advocates asserted that each man should have been captured instead of killed; and others claimed the operations were unlawful “assassinations” or, in the case of Awlaki, a violation of his constitutional rights as an American citizen.  These criticisms are all without merit.  

As his reign drew to a close in the late 1970s, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had few allies. He had persecuted the Communists, thwarted the advocates of liberal democracy, antagonized conservative landholders, and provoked the religious conservatives. Having publically opposed or oppressed almost every group in Iran, the Shah sowed the seeds of his own destruction. When the Islamic revolution broke out, he had few but his remaining loyal soldiers to turn to.

Globalization has increasingly wired the world for the rapid transfer of information. In Egypt, the Mubarak regime recognized that information is power and created repressive institutions to control these flows. Torture, censorship, and murder kept Egyptians in fear and impeded them from organizing and opposing Mubarak in a large-scale manner. But then, with the click of a button, the situation changed. Pictures exposing murders and torture were posted on blogs; groups and discussion forums criticizing the regime’s reactionary nature appeared. Moreover, the decentralized character of the Internet impeded Mubarak’s coercive apparatus from stopping this process.