via Lobe Log
by Farideh Farhi
Okay, it is time to admit that the only thing predictable about Iranian politics these days is its unpredictability!
There are people who know Iran well and as early as a few months ago thought that the next president of the country was already decided by the powers [...]
via Lobe Logby Farideh Farhi
Iran’s June 14 presidential election, only about a month and a half away, will get ample attention — and more than a dose of speculation — from everyone interested in the big picture items: whether there will be an actual choice of candidates, whether the result will have an [...]
via Lobe Log
by Farideh Farhi
From the looks of it, the second round of talks with Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan was a complete failure, with both sides unable to even find a common language to begin a process of give and take. The sense I get is that the US side is rather [...]
via Lobe Log
by Farideh Farhi
Others have written about the gist of a new report by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) on the impact of sanctions (here, here and here), so I am not going to provide a summary. But some points are worth reiterating. As Stephen Walt points out, the report [...]
by Farideh Farhi
via IPS News
Since Barack Obama became president of the United States, messages marking the Iranian New Year – Norouz – celebrated at the onset of spring have become yearly affairs. So have responses given by Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from the city of Mashhad where he makes a [...]
via Lobe Log
by Farideh Farhi
Much about various Iranian and non-Iranian narratives and reporting on the assassination of General Hassan Shateri (aka Khoshnevis) is unclear or contradictory. Let’s just say that reports cannot even agree on the date he died on. So I leave it to others to practice the art of speculation [...]
via Lobe Log
by Farideh Farhi
This Washington Post article about Iran and Hezbollah building networks in Syria in the event of Bashar al-Assad’s fall is certainly eye-catching. It’s also suggestive of Iranian shrewdness in trying to make the best out of every situation they face in the region.
Assad’s turmoil was supposed [...]
via Lobe Log
by Farideh Farhi
During my childhood days in pre-revolutionary Iran, I played the game Telephone often. It began with one kid whispering a phrase to the person beside them. Each child then whispered the same phrase until it reached the last person, who revealed a phrase invariably quite different from the [...]
via Lobe Log
by Farideh Farhi
As most observers and students of Iranian politics know, paranoia about behind-the-scenes British machinations and interference has a special place in Iranian politics and the Iranian psyche. Dinner conversations about any world event, even in family settings, may easily be peppered with at least one person confidently asserting [...]
via Lobe Log
Since Saturday, more than a dozen young journalists working for five reformist newspapers and journals, one news agency (Iranian labor News Agency or ILNA), and one website (Baztab), have been arrested mostly at their place of work on order from the Iranian Judiciary. Little is yet known about the reasons for [...]
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