via LobeLog
by David Collier*
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, recently cast fresh doubt on the possibility of a nuclear deal by the July 20 deadline for the ongoing talks between Iran and world powers in Vienna. This came after Iranian foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif claimed the West was suffering from [...]
Reposted by arrangement with Think Progress
Jeffrey Goldberg’s report on a meeting of National Security Council Principals Committee (NSC/PC), in which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence on the peace process and the fact that “the U.S. has received nothing in return” for [...]
The Commander of the U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) has joined his predecessor, Gen. David Petraeus, in endorsing the concept of linkage.
The notion of linkage contends that a festering Arab-Israeli conflict takes a strategic toll on the U.S. in the Middle East.
In an Congressional testimony, CENTCOM head Gen. James Mattis [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for March 1-2:
The Wall Street Journal: The WSJ’s editorial board catalogs newspaper and blog commentary on “The ‘Israel First’ Myth: Obsessed with the Jewish state, Mideast ‘experts’ got the region all wrong.” The writers lash out at the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman for his history of [...]
As mentioned in today’s Talking Points, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon has an op-ed in the Washington Times in which he pronounces the “death of ‘linkage’.” Ayalon claims that both the recent instability in the Middle East and WikiLeaks provide proof that “linkage”—which he defines as “if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was solved, [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for February 25:
The Weekly Standard: Jaime Daremblum, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, blogs on the “underreported news” that the U.S. government is investigating “whether Venezuela recently defied American sanctions by sending gasoline to the Islamic Republic.” “‘Hugo Chávez and PDVSA are actively helping Iran [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for February 23:
The Wall Street Journal: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Emanuele Ottolenghi opines, “Arabs’ revolutionary awakening belies Western conventional wisdom in the Middle East,” and repeats a linkage-denying argument that “ordinary Arabs who rose against their regimes didn’t do so because they wanted [...]
Lara Friedman, of Americans for Peace Now, has a great post up on Huffington in which she debunks the many claims of American Jewish Committee Chief David Harris.
Friedman takes on Harris’s attempt to debunk ‘linkage,’ the concept that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a burden on U.S. policy-making in the Middle East. [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for February 9:
The Wall Street Journal: Kenneth M. Pollack, director of the Saban center at the Brookings Institution, opines, “Could al Qaeda Hijack Egypt’s Revolution?” and observes, “the Iranian regime is also gleeful about the collapse of Mr. Mubarak, one of America’s most important Arab allies and [...]
Former Undersecretary of Defense Dov Zakheim is coming out strongly against an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Zakheim, a foreign policy hawk, talked to The Jerusalem Post at the Herzliya Conference.
Zakheim said in an interview that in his opinion, Israel did not have to attack Iran to stop its [...]
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