Iran Student Leader Says He Regrets 1979 US Embassy Attack
His revolutionary fervor diminished by the years that have also turned his dark brown hair white, one of the Iranian student leaders of the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover says he now regrets the seizure of the diplomatic compound and the 444-day hostage crisis that followed. ...
Why the Islamic Republic of Iran keeps taking hostages
On November 4, the Islamic Republic will again “celebrate” the taking of the US Embassy forty years ago. Regime loyalists will chant “Death to America” and the spectacle will be broadcast around the world, no doubt prompting statements of outrage from the US and other governments. ...
GHOST TOWERS The view from Iran’s housing crisis
After the Iranian Revolution, in 1979, the theocracy called on women to breed a new Islamic generation. It lowered the marriage age to nine for girls and fourteen for boys; it legalized polygamy and raised the price of birth control. By 1986, the average family had six children. ...
Rouhani Punctures Hope for Iran-U.S. Thaw - By Ray Takeyh, CFR Expert
There was much anticipation, even hope, as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani arrived in New York for this year’s UN General Assembly meeting. The recent attack on Saudi oil installations, which the United States and its allies blame on Iran, unsettled everyone, and spurred diplomatic efforts to avert war. Perhaps the most active on this front was French President Emmanuel Macron, who conducted his own version of shuttle diplomacy by trying to broker a meeting between Rouhani and U.S. President Donald J. Trump. Rouhani’s truculent UN address, however, should put an end to speculation about such a meeting. ...
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei Is One Despot Trump Might Not Win Over
Iran’s President arrived in New York City in September and left, as usual, without meeting the American one. Both Hassan Rouhani and Donald Trump professed an appetite for sitting down and talking over the ever more treacherous rift between their nations. But as Rouhani has pointed out in private, Iran’s top elected official “has no authority in foreign policy.” That authority–and nearly every other strand of power in the Islamic Republic–resides with the elderly cleric who remained 6,000 miles away, in the country he has not left for decades. ...
Khomeinism vs. Trumpism: Dr. Mansour Farhang Response to Javad Zarif
Iran’s theocracy and Trumpism have irresolvable power oriented conflicts, but they match each other’s nihilism when it comes to human rights issues. ...
Noam Chomsky Statement of Support
In these troubled and dangerous times, the Fifth Congress of Union for Secular Republic and Human Rights in Iran takes on unusual significance. I would like to join those who strongly endorse the call for Iranians to unite in undertaking non-violent measures to move towards establishing a secular republic in Iran, and the demand to oppose, strenuously, any external interference in Iran’s affairs. These objectives merit full and committed support. Noam Chomsky ...
Trump's Worst Nightmare? Meet Iran's Deadly Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - Mark Episkopos
The Quds Force has been a constant thorn in the side of American interests in the Middle East, providing military aid and direct combat support to anti-US militants in such hotspots as Iraq and Afghanistan. ...
A pre-election strike on Iran? -Tabish Khair
Is Iran being set up for a ‘limited scale conflict’ just before the U.S. presidential election? This is a suspicion that might be far from the minds of North and West European leaders, hailing from countries that, since World War II, have been sceptical of war, especially in their own neighbourhoods. But Iran is not really in their neighbourhood. Will countries like Germany, France or Brexiting-U.K. have the conviction or coherence to stand up for Iran, which has been pushed into a corner by the one-sided withdrawal of Donald Trump’s U.S. from the international nuclear deal brokered under former U.S. President Barack Obama? It remains one of the great ironies of politics today that Mr. Trump is such good friends with North Korea, which seems to have no intention of abandoning its nuclear weapons, and so belligerent towards Iran, which did sign an international nuclear deal! ...
Iran Among the Ruins - Vali Nasr
Over the last seven years, social upheavals and civil wars have torn apart the political order that had defined the Middle East ever since World War I. Once solid autocracies have fallen by the wayside, their state institutions battered and broken, and their national borders compromised. Syria and Yemen have descended into bloody civil wars worsened by foreign military interventions. ...
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