What History Should Teach Us About Blockading Iran
By Juan Cole
Posted by Tom Dispatch
It’s a policy fierce enough to cause great suffering among Iranians — and possibly in the long run among Americans, too. It might, in the end, even deeply harm the global economy and yet, history tells us, [...]
Everyone and their brother knows that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in Venezuela as part of a Latin American tour. It’s no secret and yet the amount of press this event has received suggests it’s more newsworthy than it is. The hype is reminiscent of the hot air blown over an Israeli announcement of a weekly flight [...]
Mitchell A. Belfer, an academic based in Prague, certainly wants you to think so. While he is not the first person who has attempted to discredit Bahrain’s protest movement by accusing Iran of instigating it, few have managed to go as far as he has with unsubstantiated claims in a well-known platform like [...]
Republished with the permission of Informed Comment
By Juan Cole
One of the places foreign policy emerged in the GOP Iowa debate last night was an exchange between Ron Paul and Rick Santorum on Iran, as right wing analyst Thomas R. Eddlem has explained in detail.
Chris Wallace of Fox [...]
An Arab Spring for Women
The Missing Story from the Middle East
By Shahin Cole and Juan Cole
Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com
The “Arab Spring” has received copious attention in the American media, but one of its crucial elements has been largely overlooked: the striking role of [...]
The Corruption Game
What the Tunisian Revolution and WikiLeaks Tell Us about American Support for Corrupt Dictatorships in the Muslim World
By Juan Cole
Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com
Here’s one obvious lesson of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011: paranoia about Muslim fundamentalist movements and terrorism is causing Washington to [...]
Meeting American Decline Face to Face
By Juan Cole
Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com
Blocked from major new domestic initiatives by a Republican victory in the midterm elections, President Barack Obama promptly lit out for Asia, a far more promising arena. That continent, after all, is rising, and Obama is eager [...]
In Monday’s Talking Points, I chronicled some of the initial responses to David Broder’s Washington Post column this past weekend. Broder suggested President Obama could revitalize the economy by going to war with Iran. The responses were mostly negative:
Despite winning support from neoconservatives like Cliff May, Broder’s logic has been ripped to [...]
The media has been buzzing about the admission from both Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai and Iran that the latter passed the former bags of cash, apparently in euros.
The allegations were first brought to light by New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins. Filkins later confirmed the exchanges of cash with Karzai himself, who [...]
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What if, even without US sanctions, Iran is geo-politically in decline?
via Lobe Log
That’s the question posed by Juan Cole, a Middle East expert and professor at the University Michigan, on his well-read blog yesterday. Just consider current regional dynamics:
If al-Assad falls in Syria and is replaced by a Sunni government of revolutionaries, they will be beholden to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and [...]