Gary Sick, a Columbia University professor and eminent scholar of the Persian Gulf, has written a short essay on Hillary Clinton’s recent threat to “obliterate Iran” should it attack Israel for the excellent Gulf 2000 listserv he maintains. Notwithstanding the chiefly domestic US political reasons that led Clinton to engage in rather vulgar sable-rattling, Sick [...]

A lot of goof stuff here, but I found this particularly funny:

I must still be groggy from the all-night travel. At my first attempt to use the phone, a Tokyo Rose voice intones in American English, “In the name of God, the number you have dialled does not exist. Please hang up and check the [...]

MEMRI has this fantastic Iranian Ministry of Intelligence public information video on the American-Zionist conspiracy to pervert Iranian youth and what YOU (i.e. concerned Iranian patriotic citizen) can do about it. Watch it all now.

Here’s Ulrich Ladurner of Die Zeit (one of Germany’s largest and most influential papers) travelling to a remote Iranian province to find out whether Ahmadinejad’s promises to improve life in the country’s regions were fulfilled.
(Which is a laudable intention, as few bother to look at the country beyond nuclear bomb issue.)
The article simply ends [...]

Prepare to have your head explode:

Dark Suspicions about the NIE NORMAN PODHORETZ - 12.03.2007 - 17:50
It is worth remembering that in 2002, one of the conclusions offered by the NIE, also with “high confidence,” was that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.” [...]

This is just plain bizarre. Where has this report been for the last two years?

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here. An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as the rationale for [...]

I don’t care about Mahmoud Ahmednijad, who is cruel and petty (as opposed to Lee Bollinger, who is just petty), but I do care about this open letter by Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji and co-signed by an A-list of academics and intellectuals.
Open Letter from Akbar Ganji to the UN Secretary-General
September 18, 2007
To His Excellency Ban [...]

Experts Doubt Drop In Violence in Iraq - washingtonpost.com:
The U.S. military’s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.
Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of [...]

Andrew Exum offers reasons against war on Iran, from a military perspective:
Leaving aside the relative merits of a strike against the Iranians, why might America’s military resist such action? First, consider the fact that the US has at the moment 162,000 troops in Iraq, 30,000 in Kuwait, 4,500 in Bahrain and 3,300 in Qatar - [...]

Iran: mostly nasty, but sometimes they may be on to something. (No, not really.) Meanwhile, the Lebanese are the last people to discover Facebook, apparently.

U.S. Weighing Terrorist Label for Iran Guards - New York Times:
WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 — The Bush administration is preparing to declare that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is a foreign terrorist organization, senior administration officials said Tuesday.
If imposed, the declaration would signal a more confrontational turn in the administration’s approach to Iran and would be the [...]

Reformist paper closed by Iran for second time:
Authorities in Iran closed down the country’s leading reformist newspaper yesterday in the latest stage of an offensive against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents in the media.
Shargh, which has been critical of Mr Ahmadinejad, was ordered to shut after running an interview with an anti-regime poet last Saturday. The [...]

Activists’ parents accuse Tehran of torturing their sons:
Fears that Iran is systematically mistreating political prisoners and dissidents have been further fuelled after the parents of three detained student activists claimed their sons had been tortured.
In a letter to the country’s judiciary chief, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the parents alleged that the students have suffered a [...]

Negar Azimi has a long piece on US democracy promotion efforts in Iran called Hard Realities of Soft Power. It includes reference to US policymaking, the misguided attacks on VOA Persian (widely considered to be an excellent service, both as a radio station and a program that increases esteem for the US in Iranian eyes) [...]

Persian Ghosts: Chris Toensing reviews books about the “Shia revival” and finds some wishful thinking.

Click on the film poster to go to Marjane Satrapi’s MySpace page and see the trailers for the animated version of her great comic book Persepolis (which you should read if you haven’t yet.)

My friend Andrew Tabler, the editor of Syria Today and a very knowledgeable guy on all things shami, has a thought-provoking piece in the NY Times Magazine about the “Shiitization”of Syria:
Over the last five years, however, Iranian donors have financed the restoration of half a dozen Shiite tombs and shrines in Syria and built at [...]

From Yediot Ahronot:
We need to kill him
Israel should not shy away from threatening to kill Iran’s Ahmadinejad
Uri Orbach
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has to be killed. Really be killed, I mean, physically. He should be eliminated, put to death, assassinated, and all those words that serve to say the same thing.
Former Mossad Director Meir Amit said [...]

Bill O’Reilly interviews Condoleeza Rice. Laughable (bold mine):
QUESTION: We have Madame Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the line, and last time we spoke was last summer and you were confident then that the UN was going to really get tough on Iran. It didn’t happen until last week. Why the delay with Iran? [...]