Current Analysis Iran in the Campaign's Crosshairs The war of words over Iran's nuclear program keeps expanding. It’s now a multi-sided melee pitting Iran against the West and Israel, Israel against the Obama administration, Mitt Romney against Barack Obama, and neo-conservatives like William Kristol against the rest of the US foreign policy establi Chris Toensing • 2 min read
Current Analysis "Iran Will Require Assurances" Hossein Mousavian has served as visiting research scholar at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security from 2009 to the present. Prior to this position, he held numerous positions in the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including director-general of its West Europe department Aslı Bâli • 30 min read
Current Analysis Threat Inflation via Memory Lane In 2005, Yale professor Philip Smith published a fascinating book Why War? to examine the “cultural logic” underpinning three major Middle East conflicts involving Western democracies -- the 1956 tripartite aggression in Suez, the 1991 Gulf war and the 2003 Iraq war. Smith’s thesis is that, while “hard” geopolitical Chris Toensing • 4 min read
Current Analysis War Drums and Obama For the last three weeks or so, liberal commentators have repeatedly insisted that the Obama administration bears little to no responsibility for the ever louder beating of the Iran war drums. Whatever such sounds the White House makes are just pre-election theater necessitated by Republican attacks, they say, or reflexive Chris Toensing • 4 min read
Current Analysis Strategic Commodity 201 Goodness! Look at this marxisant rubbish: Chris Toensing • 3 min read
Current Analysis A Not So Distant Mirror At the risk of stating the obvious, there are eerie and multiplying parallels between the long lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war and what passes for debate on what to do about the Iranian nuclear research program. Chris Toensing • 3 min read
Current Analysis Fading False Flags First the latest assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist happened on a slow news day (Romney wins New Hampshire -- zzzz), prompting many major American outlets to give it prominent coverage. The LA Times editorial board was not pleased [http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-carbo Chris Toensing • 2 min read
Current Analysis Narrowing the Options on the Table Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s foreign minister and former representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is not usually a sarcastic man. But he became one in early November following several days of leaks about the negative content of a pending IAEA report on Iran. “Marg yek bar, shivan Farideh Farhi • 14 min read
Current Analysis Obama's Nuclear Postures In his first official statement after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, President Harry Truman claimed the new weapon as a fundamental breakthrough in military capability and a uniquely American achievement. The Hiroshima bomb, he said, was “more than two thousand times the blast power of…the largest bomb ever yet Zia Mian • 16 min read
MER Article Ahmadinejad's Nuclear Folly The tumult in Iran since the June 12 presidential election is, without a doubt, the most significant sequence of events in the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution itself. No other occurrence -- not the Iran-Iraq war, not the 1989 turmoil that sidelined Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, until t Farideh Farhi • 12 min read
MER Article The Growing Danger of a Nuclear Middle East Every country in the Arab world, it seems, wants a nuclear reactor. In May 2008, a consortium of seven nations, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, announced they had agreed on a plan to boost nuclear power generation in the region. The proclamation is onl Carah Ong • 11 min read
Current Analysis War Is Peace, Sanctions Are Diplomacy The White House is pressing ahead with its stated goal of persuading the UN Security Council to pass far-reaching sanctions to punish Iran for refusing to suspend its nuclear research program. Sanctions are what President George W. Bush is referring to when he pledges to nervous US allies that he in Carah Ong • 13 min read
