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By Daniel Luban
Wednesday’s Washington Post contains a rundown of the Obama administration’s current thinking on Iran sanctions. The bottom line: administration officials are increasingly open to sanctions, but want to find ways to target the Revolutionary Guard and other hardline elements within the regime without inflicting needless suffering on the civilian population. For that reason, [...]
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By Daniel Luban
The images coming out of Iran in recent days have spoken for themselves, and I don’t have much to add to what others have said. It is nearly impossible for anyone — let alone an outsider half a world away — to predict what the outcome of the protests will be.
Still, the protests [...]
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There are so many substantive reasons why Thursday’s op-ed in the New York Times by Alan Kuperman was just awful that one hardly knows where to begin. Fortunately, Marc Lynch and Helena Cobban, among others, have covered most of the ground (except, for example, the environmental and health impacts of an attack on the Bushehr [...]
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By Eli Clifton
With the recent passage of HR 2194–the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA)–and the likelihood of a breakthrough in negotiations with Tehran before the informal end of the year deadline fading, it’s worth re-examining how the U.S. got to the point we’re at today, how Iranian-U.S. relations could have turned out differently, and [...]
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By Eli Clifton
Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has continued his high-profile return to the public sphere in an interview with the Jewish Telegraph Agency’s Jacob Berkman.
The interview is worth a read and has some amusing parts. Particularly of interest are the portions in which he repeatedly claims to have no involvement in politics, says he [...]
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By Eli Clifton
Las Vegas Sands Corporation billionaire Sheldon Adelson resurfaced at a pro-settler Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) dinner on December 13th. Adelson has been noticeably quiet in recent months as his efforts—one would assume—have been focused on keeping his casino empire afloat. With the worst of the financial crisis passing it would [...]
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By Eli Clifton
Thomas Friedman’s column today in the New York Times manages to surpass his usual indifference to detail or nuance by arguing that the “Virtual Afghanistan” is as dangerous to U.S. national security as any threat posed by the real Afghanistan and that Muslims are in desperate need of serious civil war.
Friedman’s main source [...]
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By Eli Clifton
This morning Adam Brickley posted on the Weekly Standard’s blog that, “Tea Partiers and Palinistas here in the States would do well to watch conservative Aussie leader Tony Abbott very closely.” Brickley is correct that Abbott has engineered a coup of sorts in Australia’s Liberal Party—taking over the leadership after their ex-leader, [...]
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by Jim Lobe
As predicted, Bob Kagan follows in Kristol’s wake. Afghanistan is so passé; it’s clearly time to focus on Iran. Check out the last paragraph in his column in Sunday’s Washington Post — specifically, the order in which the problems facing Obama are presented, and then the singling out of Iran:
“It is only natural [...]
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by Matthew Berger
The irony is how calm they are. It has been proven repeatedly that global surface temperatures are rising at unprecedented rates, that people are dying as a direct result of the catastrophes these changes have caused, and that ways of life – not to mention entire species – are disappearing. Certainly statements like [...]
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