(Editor’s note: This is the introduction to the new primer, Iran in the Crosshairs, published by the Institute for Policy Studies. The full report is available here. Print copies can be ordered by calling IPS.)
If the whole body is a heart, then the woman who steps out of the car with Texas plates to yell at the silent peace vigil is a heart overlaid with hate
Negotiations between Belgrade and Prishtina over the final status of Kosovo have officially failed, and Russia will veto any Western attempt at the UN Security Council to recognize the independence of this Serbian province populated by mostly ethnic Albanians.
When the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was released noting that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003, the council moved into action. Unanimously, it passed a resolution ensuring that no preemptive military attack by the United States against Iran would take place.
On December 3, 2007, the long-awaited and much delayed National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran was released to the public after more than a year of congressional and public demands for its release. The new assessment, which represents the consensus view of all 16 American intelligence agencies, says that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold. This new assessment contradicts the 2005 NIE, which assessed with "high confidence" that Iran was determined to have a nuclear weapon and was working inexorably towards this end.
Editors Note: The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007).
It is through the eyes of the very young that the rest of us, even the only slightly older, often get a glimpse of what is actually happening.
“We have to decide, as a nation, whether our need for Middle Eastern oil is more important to our future than our conduct as a moral and ethical people.” Which brave presidential candidate would lay it on the line so clearly? None yet. And that’s the problem with the national debate on the war in Iraq, and possibly, our foray into Iran as well.