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Iran Declares Victory in Syria - John Gay, The National Interest

In the days after the joint Syrian Army–Lebanese Hezbollah victory over the rebels in the strategic town of Qusayr, the Assad regime has been positively giddy,announcing ...

Who Will Be Iran's Next Ahmadinejad? - Reese Erlich, Global Post

With Iran’s presidential elections Friday, Tehran is in full campaign mode. Political posters are hanging from city walls, and enthusiastic rallies and informal marches are t...

Obama Should Play JFK with Iran - Matthew Bunn, CS Monitor

Fifty years ago, John F. Kennedy announced the US would stop nuclear tests in space. The move was meant to build trust for negotiations with the Soviets, and it worked. President O...

Illegal Political Satire in Iran - Abigail Nehring, The Atlantic

In the world of Iranian actor Kambiz Hosseini, almost everything about his country's presidential elections is side-splittingly funny. "Becoming the president of Iran is like maki...

India's Stategic Failure in Central Asia - Stephen Blank, The Diplomat

India’s political, cultural, and historical ties to Central Asia date back to antiquity. But contemporary circumstances, namely the quest for energy and the threat of terrorism...

Iran's Leaders Are Not Rational - Saeed Ghasseminejad, Times of Israel

Don't believe that Iran is a rational actor....

Hezbollah's Vietnam? - Michael Young, NOW Lebanon

The only thing odd about Hezbollah’s intervention in the Syrian conflict is that it took over two years for the party and its backers in Tehran to make the decision. That&rsq...

Iran's Eight Dwarves - Amir Taheri, New York Post

Would it make any difference? This is the question that Iranians face as their presidential election enters its final phase with a two-week campaign drawing to a close....

The Desperation of the Ayatollah - Dieter Bednarz, Der Spiegel

On June 14, Iranians will choose their next president, but the candidates have been handpicked by an increasingly unyielding Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Hopes for a quick re...

Al-Qaeda vs. Hezbollah - Clifford May, National Review

Back during the Bush administration, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage famously called Hezbollah the “A Team of terrorists,” adding, “al-Qaeda is actually the B Te...

The Friend of My Enemy Is My Enemy - Michael Totten, City Journal

Syria’s blood-soaked tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, is finally right about something. He recently told an Argentine newspaper that he doubts the joint Russian-American peace initiati...

Iran Outmaneuvers U.S. in Syrian Proxy War - Vali Nasr, Bloomberg

The Syrian uprising offered the possibility of a strategic defeat of Iran. In this scenario, Iran would be weakened by the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, its single Ar...

Don't Discount Iran's Elections - Dennis Ross, Foreign Affairs

Many commentators have dismissed the upcoming Iranian presidential election, reasoning that the Supreme Leader makes all the important political decisions anyway -- above all, thos...

Tehran & Washington: Unlikely Allies in Iraq - Kenneth Pollack, Brookings

Once again, Iraqis are baffled by the apparent collusion of Iran and the United States when it comes to Iraq. Although both Washington and Tehran claim to oppose the other, what Ir...

Why Iran's Greens Gave Up on Democracy - Kelly Niknejad, Foreign Policy

Iran's protest movement struggles to make its voice heard in an election where they have no good options....

Iran Arms Terrorists, Obama Dithers - David Meyers, RealClearWorld

For years, the State Department has labeled Iran as the world's leading sponsor of terror. In their most recent report, the Department concluded that "Iran and Hezbollah's terroris...

Lebanon Inches Toward Disaster - Rajan Menon, The National Interest

It has been Lebanon’s unenviable fate to be the playground for the deadly games of its more powerful and rivalrous neighbors. What has made Lebanon particularly vulnerable to the...

Ahmadinejad Always Doomed to Be an Outcast - Cameron Abadi, TNR

For someone who presided over the imprisonment of his competitors in the last presidential election, and routinely trolled sensible people everywhere by denying the Holocaust, this...

Putin's Missiles Will Change the Mideast Game - Michael Bell, Globe & Mail

The S-300 system is intended by Russia to restore Syrian sovereignty over its airspace, which it had de facto ceded to Israel. The system is intended to discourage Israeli air atta...

US, Russia and Iran: Teammates, After All - The Boston Globe

The United States, Iran, and Russia do not agree on much, but they found common ground in a joint effort to save wrestling as an Olympic sport. On Wednesday, just a few months afte...

War on Terror Is Over? Someone Should Tell Iran - NY Daily News

Only a week after President Obama declared an end to the global war on terror, the State Department accused Iran of “a marked resurgence” in its global export of terrorism to �...

Forget Diplomacy, Iran Needs Force - Gerecht & Dubowitz, Globe & Mail

Diplomats often have a hard time being frank for the entirely understandable reason that they have to talk to the same foreigners day after day. Their love of process - the elevati...

Iran's Guards a Syria Game-Changer - Con Coughlin, The Telegraph

The real game-changer on the ground has been the training and equipment provided by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, who have helped to train thousands of Syrians to fight on the regim...

Will Sexual Revolution Topple Iran Regime? - Afshin Shahi, Foreign Policy

When someone mentions Iran, what images leap into your mind? Ayatollahs, religious fanaticism, veiled women? How about sexual revolution? That's right. Over the last 30 years, as t...

Iran's Latin American Terror Network - David Barnett, Long War Journal

On May 29, Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor who investigated the 1994 AMIA bombing, issued a 500-page indictment that accused Iran of establishing terror networks through...

Anti-West Hardliner Gains in Iranian Race - Thomas Erdbrink, NY Times

Mr. Jalili, known as Iran's unyielding nuclear negotiator and a protege of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is emerging as the presumed front-runner in Iran’s pres...

The Brezhnev Doctrine, Iran-Style - Elliott Abrams, Weekly Standard

Grasping the realities of the Middle East is never easy. This is not primarily because they change quickly, but because so much time, effort, and money is spent to prevent reality ...

Not the End of the World if Iran Gets the Bomb - Alireza Nader, FP

It's as clear as day that the Islamic Republic pursues goals in the Middle East that put it on a collision course with the United States. Iran is opposed to Israel as a Jewish stat...

Iran's Regime Engineers Another Election - Abbas Milani, New Republic

In spite of Khamenei’s show of force, there has been increasing criticism of his foreign policies. Rouhani, Rafsanjani's protégé, said that when he and his alli...

U.S. Must Look Past Iran's Staged Election - Washington Post

President Obama has said the United States won’t tolerate Iran developing a nuclear weapon, and his administration has imposed tough economic sanctions. It has responded with gre...

Responding to Iran's Nuclear Games - Ross & Makovsky, Washington Post

Perhaps because of U.S. hesitancy on Syria, or our withdrawal from Iraq, or our transition out of Afghanistan, or talk of the U.S. “pivot” to Asia, Iranian leaders seem not to ...

In Syria, Go Big or Stay Home - Ray Takeyh, New York Times

The sort of intervention needed to bring about a decisive rebel victory would require more than no-fly zones and arms. It would mean disabling Mr. Assad’s air power and putting b...

More Is Less with Proposed Iran Sanctions - Bloomberg

Once a new president is installed in Tehran, the negotiators from China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K. and U.S. ought to propose an action-for-action road map, laying out all t...

Khamenei's Slow-Motion Power Grab in Iran - Peter Jones, Globe and Mail

It seems that the Supreme Leader has opted to forgo the constitutionally complex job of abolishing the presidency, at least for now, in favour of the simpler task of engineering th...

In Iran, Two Bombing Suspects for Prez - Jonathan Schanzer, The Atlantic

After disqualifying a number of presidential candidates from the June 14 elections, Iran's Guardian Council has pared the list down to eight. Remarkably, two of the remaining candi...

Khamenei's Election Headache - Barry Rubin, Jerusalem Post

With less than a month to go before the elections – the campaign is only three weeks long to make things harder for the opposition – it is now clear who the candidates are, a...

What 'Moderate' Rafsanjani Teaches Us About Iran - Rob Fulford, Nat'l Post

Rafsanjani would have to improve greatly in order to become merely terrible. Still, he’s worth studying. To truly appreciate how foul a dictatorship can be, we need to unders...

Three Reasons to Like Iran's Candidates - Zachary Keck, The Diplomat

This week’s disqualification of Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei and Akbar Hasehmi Rafsanjani as presidential candidates was bad for Iranian democracy and the Islamic Republic. But it...

Don't Take Your Eye Off Iran - Michael Oren, Washington Post

The world is, understandably, focused on the Middle East. The map of the region — drawn a century ago by European powers to reflect imperial interests rather than ethnic realitie...

Why Does Iran Bother Voting? - Arch Puddington, Freedom at Issue

With the exceptions of the few remaining absolute monarchies and communist dictatorships, most authoritarian regimes feel compelled to hold elections in which different candidates ...

Why Iranians Are Still Excited to Vote - Hooman Majd, Foreign Affairs

With the Iranian government having disqualified two of the country's boldest presidential candidates, it is unlikely the election will address any major ideological questions. But ...

Tehran's Designs on Afghanistan - Sanjay Kumar, The Diplomat

Evidence from Herat and elsewhere suggests a growing – and at times deadly – Iranian influence over its eastern neighbor....

Khamenei Tightens His Grip in Iran - Karl Vick, Time

For the cleric who runs Iran, there’s no such thing as a pleasant surprise, especially on election day. Ayatullah Ali Khamenei was not pleased when a librarian named Mohammed Kh...

Can a Deal Be Made with a Ruthless Iran? - Roger Cohen, NYRB

Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett are unusual among former staffers of the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council in their deep affection for the Islamic Republ...

After Ahmadinejad - Mehdi Khalaji, Project Syndicate

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s preferred successor, Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, will not be running in the June 14 election. Neither will former President Akbar Hashemi ...

Ahmadinejad Adviser Arrested

A simmering rivalry between Iran’s president and powerful adversaries within the conservative hierarchy spilled into the open on Monday when security forces briefly arrested ...

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