In their zeal to undermine or discredit Obama in any way they can, the neo-conservative Weekly Standard and former top Bush adviser Karl Rove have been indirectly making the case that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the single, most important recruitment tool of Al Qaeda and presumably other violent Islamist groups based in the borderlands of [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for December 28, 2010:
The Weekly Standard: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘ Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz write that the Obama administration’s sanctions against Iran have “assiduously avoided punishing any major European, Russian, or Chinese transgressor of U.S.-mandated sanctions,” and that they must now [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for December 23-27, 2010:
The Weekly Standard: Stephen F. Hayes blogs on a report that a member of Iran’s Qods Force, serving as a Taliban commander, has been arrested in Afghanistan. Hayes writes that this capture disproves the commonly held belief that Iran and the Taliban are [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for December 21, 2010:
Washington Post: The Post‘s neoconservative blogger Jennifer Rubin picks up on a Wall Street Journal story where anonymous U.S. officials comment that the United States may soon abandon engagement with Iran. “Could the Obama administration really be stiffening its spine [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for December 17, 2010:
Weekly Standard: Michael Weiss attacks the concept of ‘linkage‘ in a long, convoluted piece on the Standard‘s blog. Leading off with an overstatement explanation of linkage (“by resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict most other problems will be resolved”), Weiss goes on to [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for December 16, 2010:
The Weekly Standard: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Benjamin Weinthal blogs on The Weekly Standard that the detainment of two German journalists in Iran should put call attention to German politicians who have travelled to Iran and continued to maintain contact [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for December 14, 2010:
The Weekly Standard: Stephen F. Hayes and Foundation for Defense of Democracies fellow Thomas Joscelyn write, in an article called “The Iran Connection”, that Undersecretary of State William Burns, in his Dec. 1 appearance before the House Foreign Affairs committee, “chose not to [...]
News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for December 4-6, 2010:
National Review Online: American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Ali Alfoneh opines that expectations should be “subzero” for the P5+1 talks, continuing today in Geneva, since “the Iranian negotiators in Geneva represent the Ahmadinejad government and possibly Khamenei, therefore they cannot deliver what they [...]
With neo-conservatives, you never know whether their preaching (especially about issues such as human rights or democracy) shows a complete lack of self-consciousness (given their long support for brutal autocracies firmly allied with Israel and/or the United States), genuine amnesia, or shamelessness (chutzpah) of the highest order.
So it is with Elliott Abrams‘ latest [...]
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News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for January 5 to January 7:
The Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin, writing on her Right Turn blog, asks whether India is doing enough to enforce sanctions against Iran. Rubin, picking up on The Wall Street Journal’s reporting, writes, “The revelation that the government of India ‘advised [...]