by Wayne White Although the Obama administration appears to be currently focused on resisting calls to increase sanctions on Iran while negotiations over its nuclear program are in session, the far more dangerous “military option” is alive and well in Washington despite its many pitfalls. Senator-elect Tom Cotton (R-Ark) told a group of reporters on
by Derek Davison
With the rumored extension of the negotiations in Vienna on Iran’s nuclear program hanging in the air, a group of legislators and right-wing thinkers gathered on Capitol Hill yesterday to talk about what they believe a comprehensive deal with Iran should entail.
Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) told the assembled crowd that he was there [...]
The fall issue of the Washington Quarterly has just published what may end up being the worst, most garbled policy piece on Iran within the last decade or so. Curiously, the authors, Kenneth Pollack and Ray Takeyh, are mainstream centrists who claim that they have long “articulated both the rationale and the broad features [...]
In September Kenneth M. Pollack of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations published a paper in the Washington Quarterly endorsing a largely stick-based policy approach to Iran. Stephen M. Walt has analyzed it on his Foreign Policy blog and in doing so offers a [...]
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 [...]
Council on Foreign Relations scholar Ray Takeyh has an intriguing op-ed in the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times. He asks: “Just how stable is Iran’s clerical regime?”
Takeyh starts with a little armchair psychology on the Islamic Republic’s enforcers — the mid-level officials as well as the foot [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for December 15, 2010:
The Diplomat: American Enterprise Institute Scholar Michael Rubin is interviewed on The Diplomat blog on “how sanctions can work with Iran.” Rubin says that sanctions are having both an economic and reputational impact. “[Iranians] look at themselves as a country that was once [...]
The Iran-grand-bargainers, the Leveretts, have an interesting piece up challenging the notion that the Barack Obama administration was ever serious about engaging Iran. (Because I’m behind on my reading, I only picked up on it via the Progressive Realist.)
These are the same allegations that Dennis Ross, Obama’s top National Security Council official for [...]
In engaging Iran, the U.S. has found difficulty in balancing the West’s interest in seeing Iran end its alleged nuclear weapons program with pressure on Iranian leadership to improve human rights, particularly in the wake of the 2009 Iranian presidential election.
Unfortunately, these interest are often mutually exclusive. Calls for supporting the Green Movement are [...]
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“President Obama and the bipartisan, bicameral congressional leadership, have deepened America’s support for Israel in difficult times”: In what multiple outlets have deemed a “rare” statement, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) issued a press release on Sunday praising the Obama Administration – as well as both Congressional Republicans [...]