Oded Yinon, whose 1982 paper for Kivunim (Directions) entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, is often used as a reference point for evidence of an Israeli aim to balkanise the surrounding Arab and Muslim world into ethnic and sectarian mini-states, was recently interviewed. He discussed the notoriety of the document which came to a wider audience a few years later after it was translated into English by Israel Shahak. ...
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2018-07-30
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2018-06-22
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a series of tweets on Wednesday and Thursday describing growing unrest in Iran and suggesting the reasons for it. Pompeo’s tweets come as many, including in the US Congress, look to the Trump administration to clarify its strategy and objectives in Iran following its decision six weeks ago to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal. Pompeo’s anti-Iranian tweets appeared as Mustafa Hijri, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), and Abdullah Mohtadi, head of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, completed an extended visit to Washington which included meetings that Hijri held at the State Department.
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2018-06-20
Buoyed by an apparent resurgence in interest in Kurdish rebel groups in Washington, Iranian Kurdish rebel leaders appear to be maneuvering to gain support from the United States as Washington moves to confront the Islamic Republic.
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2018-06-01
This fact sheet provides a rough overview of U.S. military bases and facilities in the Middle East. Compiled from publicly available information, this listing presents a picture of a variety of facilities the U.S. either maintains or retains access to throughout the region. Due to the fluctuating nature of U.S. military operations in the region, it is not possible to put together a complete picture of the entirety of U.S. forces’ deployment. As the wars in Iraq and against ISIS have ebbed and flowed, so has the U.S. presence in the region.
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2018-05-25
The question is: has the Trump administration already made a decision to go to war with Iran, similar to the determination of the Bush administration to invade Iraq in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington? ...
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2018-05-21
So what should it be? We must begin to define what it is that we demand from Iran. First, Iran must declare to the IAEA a full account of the prior military dimensions of its nuclear program, and permanently and verifiably abandon such work in perpetuity. Second, Iran must stop enrichment and never pursue plutonium reprocessing. This includes closing its heavy water reactor. Third, Iran must also provide the IAEA with unqualified access to all sites throughout the entire country. Iran must end its proliferation of ballistic missiles and halt further launching or development of nuclear-capable missile systems. Iran must release all U.S. citizens, as well as citizens of our partners and allies, each of them detained on spurious charges. Iran must end support to Middle East terrorist groups, including Lebanese Hizballah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Iran must respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi Government and permit the disarming, demobilization, and reintegration of Shia militias. Iran must also end its military support for the Houthi militia and work towards a peaceful political settlement in Yemen. Iran must withdraw all forces under Iranian command throughout the entirety of Syria. Iran, too, must end support for the Taliban and other terrorists in Afghanistan and the region, and cease harboring senior al-Qaida leaders. Iran, too, must end the IRG Qods Force’s support for terrorists and militant partners around the world. And too, Iran must end its threatening behavior against its neighbors – many of whom are U.S. allies. This certainly includes its threats to destroy Israel, and its firing of missiles into Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It also includes threats to international shipping and destructive – and destructive cyberattacks.
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2018-05-21
The US secretary of state has set out 12 tough demands for inclusion in a new nuclear treaty with Iran. The conditions, listed by Mike Pomepo during a speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, on Monday, will require Iran, in his words, to: ...
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2018-05-09
For decades, since the Iranian Revolution, the United States has engaged in a quasi-war with Tehran. Washington backed Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, described Iran as being part of an “axis of evil” alongside Iraq and North Korea, launched the Stuxnet cyberattack on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2009, and provided weapons for Saudi Arabia to fight a proxy war against Iran in Yemen. Today, the United States and Iran still lack formal diplomatic relations. President Donald Trump described Iran as “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” with a “sinister vision of the future.” Meanwhile, Iranian propaganda pushes a narrative of resistance against the United States—the “great Satan”—as well as Israel. It’s striking, then, that since 9/11, major U.S. foreign-policy gambits in the Middle East have consistently aided Iranian interests. America is not so much Iran’s frenemy as its fremesis: a supposedly mortal adversary that unintentionally gives critical support. By scrapping the Iran nuclear deal, Trump is following an established U.S. playbook of helping Tehran.
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2018-05-08
President Donald Trump has just fulfilled a campaign pledge to tear up the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievement, a multilateral agreement constraining Iran’s nuclear enrichment (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). In doing so, the president went against the advice of, among many others, his secretary of defense, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA), Washington’s three most important European allies, and almost-two thirds of Americans who believe that the U.S. should not withdraw from the deal, according to a CNN poll released on Tuesday morning. Trump appears absolutely determined to undo as much of what Barack Obama accomplished as possible. In addition, the sheer perversity of his personality may well explain today’s action. But it may also be useful to follow the apocryphal advice that Watergate’s famous “Deep Throat” offered to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All the President’s Men, particularly in the unbelievably corrupt swamp of the Trump era. Indeed, today’s unpopular announcement may have been exactly what two of Trump’s biggest donors, Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus, and what one of his biggest inaugural supporters, Paul Singer, paid for when they threw their financial weight behind Trump. Marcus and Adelson, who are also board members of the Likudist Republican Jewish Coalition, have already received substantial returns on their investment: total alignment by the U.S. behind Israel, next week’s move of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and the official dropping of “occupied territories” to describe the West Bank and East Jerusalem
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2018-03-15
Donald Trump’s firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday was welcomed in many quarters of official Washington as a kind of deliverance—or evidence, perhaps, of justice served. The crowing could be heard all the way to the pages of the The Atlantic, whose contributors have made Tillerson a kind of Foggy Bottom piñata. It would be hard, for instance, to find a more damning criticism of “T-Rex” than the one leveled against him by author Eliot Cohen, expert on everything military and drum major for the interventionist set.