Iran Archive

WASHINGTON D.C. — Both the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees convened Wednesday to discuss the many strategic challenges posed by Iran — two meetings only amplified in significance following the news that Iran had test-launched nine missiles earlier in the day. Opening the House committee’s hearing, Chairman Howard L. Berman spoke about Iran’s missile test most directly: To illustrate the immediacy of [the Iranian threat], we need look no further than today’s news of an Iranian long-range missile test – a missile capable of carrying a nuclear payload to Israel. This, coupled with the belligerent talk from […]

Iran’s missile test is getting a lot of attention, which is to be expected given the amount of posturing going on on both sides right now. (As an idea of how out of control the media “psy ops” have gotten, there’s this article in Press TV citing Iraqi press reports of Israeli war planes secretly based in Iraq in preparation for an attack on Iran.) To my mind, the missile test launch seems like the kind of signal you’d expect the Iranians to send following the much publicized “training operation” over the Mediterranean and Greece a few weeks back. What’s […]

I found this Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation chart via Matthew Yglesias last night. As you can see, it uses a side by side comparison of U.S. and Iranian military capacity to effectively debunk the idea that Iran poses any kind of existential threat to the United States. Yglesias acknowledges the risk to regional stability represented by Iran acquiring a nuclear weapons capacity, but says that’s “a far cry from saying that Iran is, as such, any kind of serious military threat.” My first thought last night was that this line of argument is convincing because it blurs the […]

WASHINGTON — Eleven U.S. states have adopted legislation to divest public pension funds from companies with financial ties to Iran’s petroleum, defense, and nuclear sectors in an attempt to persuade Iran to give up its uranium enrichment program and alleged sponsorship of terrorism. Almost 20 more states are considering similar legislation to supplement existing federal and international sanctions. This is the first time that state investments have been leveraged for nonproliferation goals. During the 1980s, anti-apartheid activists urged state and local authorities and some universities to divest holdings from companies invested in or doing business with South Africa. During the […]