iran election

To return one more time to Vice President Biden’s what-did-he-mean-exactly remarks about a potential Israeli strike on Iran, it’s notable that Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that any military strike on Iran “could be very destabilizing.” If the was-it-a-green-light-or-was-it-a-gaffe story continues, it’ll be interesting to hear Mullen’s further thoughts [...]

On Thursday, Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council suggested that one way for the Iranian opposition to keep its resistance to the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad alive now that its legal appeals have run aground would be to persuade influential clerics to denounce the result. It seemed like wishful thinking. But as [...]

In the midst of a New York Times piece this weekend about the Iranian regime publicly airing surely-coerced “confessions” by opposition leaders about their nefarious revolutionary intent comes this recollection from a former student leader:
“They tortured me, some beatings, sleep deprivation, insults, psychological torture, standing me for several hours in front of a wall, keeping [...]

The regime crackdown has broken up the large demonstrations and the international media has largely moved on — enabled unintentionally by Michael Jackson’s death — but don’t think the Iranian opposition is done for, according to Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council. Parsi just held a conference call to reinforce the point. “The [...]

The Iranian opposition movement has been brutally suppressed by a regime that has traded legitimacy for control. Facing dire straits, what’s left for it to do? Die in a maelstrom inflicted by the Israelis, according to John Bolton, a Bush-administration undersecretary of state and U.N. ambassador.
There’s a lot of stuff in Bolton’s new Washington Post [...]

Sometimes grafs from New York Times obituaries can’t help but undermine the points they seek to make. To wit:
A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department said the department assigned its robbery and homicide division to investigate the death, but the spokesman said that was because of Mr. Jackson’s celebrity.
“Don’t read into anything,” the spokesman [...]

In comments on a previous post, my friend M. Leblanc thinks my opposition to “hot dog” diplomacy is misguided:
It’s like this: the local embassy (in my case, in Cairo) sets up a 4th of July celebration. There is American food (hot dogs, sodas, etc) provided for free to all who are invited, which includes any [...]

I know, I know. I want to read more about Sanford, too. But Akbar Ganji, the Iranian dissident I spoke with last week, has a powerful new Foreign Affairs essay describing the emerging trends within the Iranian regime:
Their ideal regime would create a state-run capitalist class eager to profit in international markets to the detriment [...]

Something is definitely happening in the Washington-based Iran debate, because there’s a lot to agree with in this Thomas Jocelyn post at The Weekly Standard. Jocelyn provides a much-more-sophisticated-than-usual take on the proposition that the Iranian regime is just going to blame whatever the opposition does on shadowy western puppetmasters. Some observers take that line [...]

Seriously, even if the invitation is a diplomatic courtesy, this is unseemly. The goons of the Iranian regime are murdering protesters. They shouldn’t be invited over to the White House for a July 4 cookout. Come on.