Middle East & North Africa Archive

If you’re not already reading Laura Rozen every day, I suggest you start doing so. The latest good reason being this story, on the behind-the-scenes role that Japan has been playing in working out an offshore fuel swap agreement for Iran’s medical nuclear reactor. The interesting aspect here is that the “Japan model” — or the technical mastery of all the separate components of a nuclear weapon capacity without the actual bomb — has often been mentioned as one interpretation of Tehran’s political objective. So long as Washington and its partners (notably France) ruled out the possibility of domestic Iranian […]

One of the subjects of the France 24 week-in-review panel discussion program I took part in on Friday — link to follow, hopefully, because it was a great group — was Tony Blair’s appearance before the U.K.’s Iraq War inquiry commission. Blair, it seems, suggested that among the reasons he had supported the invasion of Iraq was because he didn’t want the U.S. to be “alone.” This reflected, as one of the other panelists put it, how the Iraq War was a war in search of a cause, to which I responded that it seems to me that Blair had […]

A number of recent moves suggest that Iran’s mullahs and secular leaders are bridging their recent differences, even if their reconciliation is a begrudging one. These developments are not wholly unexpected. Essentially, the two sides are putting their political, confessional, and personal self-interest above all other considerations. But although the shift will result in a short-term loss of leadership figures for the opposition, the Green Movement’s desire for sweeping change has now become mainstream. Perhaps the most prominent among opposition leaders who have recently come in from the cold is former two-time president and consummate political survivor, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi […]