Will Operation Red Coalition eclipse or compound problems created by Operations Fast and Furious?
Is Iran’s Alleged Cash-for-Assassinations Plot Too Implausible to Be True?
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Iran
The Real Nuclear Threat From Iran May Not Be Nuclear Weapons
Unsafe construction practices may have been used to build Iran’s first nuclear energy facility, Bushehr.
In the End, Will Iran’s Nuclear Plans Be Decided by — Cancer?
Iran’s need for uranium for medical purposes may make it amenable to compromise over its nuclear program.
Is It a Mistake to Draw Solace From the Iran Bomb’s Long Gestation Period?
The bomb-Iran crowd draws sustenance from how weak claims that Iran won’t possess nuclear weapons soon makes disarmament advocates look.
Zahra’s Paradise
Set in the aftermath of Iran’s fraudulent elections of 2009, Zahra’s Paradise is the fictional story of the search for Mehdi, a young protestor who has disappeared in the Islamic Republic’s gulags. Mehdi has vanished in an extrajudicial twilight zone where habeas corpus is suspended.
Iran Eats Nuclear Scientist Rezaie’s Assassination as the Cost of Doing Business
There’s not much that a smaller power like Iran can do when the West assassinates one of its own except roll with the punches.
Dissecting Iran’s Economic Jihad
In the absence of genuine democratic institutions, a set of common economic grievances is galvanizing the Arab Street against a diverse host of unaccountable regimes across the Arab world. However, deep and structural economic problems also characterize much of the Middle East, including non-Arab Iran. Recognizing the depth and gravity of the country’s economic challenges, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamanei has declared 2011 as the year of “economic jihad.”
The Courtship of Iran and Pakistan
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari paid a second visit to Tehran last weekend after having been there only three weeks ago. Official reports by Pakistani and Iranian sources broadly characterized the visit as “part of the ongoing process to strengthen bilateral ties, step up consultations with countries in the region for peace and stability at a time when tension was developing in some parts and for promoting peace and stability in Afghanistan and fighting militancy.” But this rationale hardly warrants two head-of-state level official visits in such a short span of time. After all, lower-level officials could have dealt with such concerns, as in the past.
Iran Missile Tests Timed to Capitalize on Gates’s Acknowledgment U.S. Tired of War?
It may have been a coincidence but the latest round of Iranian missile tests came seven days after the outgoing US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates acknowledged that Americans were “tired of a decade of war.”
Israel and the Futility of Attacking Iran: Interview with Abolghasem Bayyenat
Given the largely conflicting political identity of the two governments which in most contexts has defined conflicting foreign policy interests for the two countries , the United States views its relations with Iran as a zero-sum game and will thus struggle to contain Iran’s growing power and influence in the region, even if this would mean swimming against the tide and creating unnecessary costs for its foreign policy in the region.