When it comes to nuclear weapons and assassinations, Iran is judged by a different standard from the West.
The West Judges Iran by Not One, But Two Double Standards
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Terrorism
“Dagan Could Not Have Set Foot in Washington Again”
Historian Mark Perry caused a firestorm with his report that Mossad officers posed as CIA officers to recruit Jundallah operatives for attacks within Iran.
My Day With a Real Thrill Kill Cult: the MEK
The Mujahideen-e Khalq’s Paris-based leadership is reluctantly cooperating with a U.N. plan to resettle its endangered members in an Iraq refugee camp.
Postcard from . . . DC: Myth of Iran Support for al-Qaeda Just Won’t Die
Iran war hawks are still trying to establish that Iran was complicit with al-Qaeda in the attacks of 9/11. Paul Mutter at the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.
The Drone That Fell From the Sky
The drone had been in the air for close to five hours before its mission crew realized that something was wrong. The oil temperature in the plane’s turbocharger, they noticed, had risen into the “cautionary” range. An hour later, it was worse, and it just kept rising as the minutes wore on. While the crew desperately ran through its “engine overheat” checklist trying to figure out the problem, the engine oil temperature, too, began skyrocketing.
The Fading U.S.-Pakistan Alliance
As the United States struggles to stabilize the volatile landscape in Afghanistan, assert a long-term strategic presence in Iraq, and contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it is gradually confronting a precarious and consequential estrangement from its long-term strategic ally, Pakistan. With rising dissatisfaction among the Pakistani political elite and growing popular anger against America, Washington is on the verge of losing another vital ally.
MEK May Be a Terrorist Organization, But It Doesn’t Deserve to Be Butchered
The remnants of Iranian dissident group the MEK confined to an Iraqi refugee camp face a massacre when the United States leaves.
Review: The Unraveling
In mid-September, bomb blasts and gunfire hit the U.S. Embassy and the NATO headquarters in Kabul, killing seven people. According to subsequent intelligence reports, the perpetrators were from the Haqqani network, which has been funded and supported by the government’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The Pakistani government denied the U.S. accusations, but the tough reactions of both sides reveal the mutual mistrust and widening cleavage between the two counter-terrorism allies.
The Passing of the Postwar Era
In every aspect of human existence, change is a constant. Yet change that actually matters occurs only rarely. Even then, except in retrospect, genuinely transformative change is difficult to identify. By attributing cosmic significance to every novelty and declaring every unexpected event a revolution, self-assigned interpreters of the contemporary scene — politicians and pundits above all — exacerbate the problem of distinguishing between the trivial and the non-trivial.
A Brief History of the Number Two
A poem for the mother of a young man killed by a bomb at Hebrew University in 2002.