Iran would be at or near the top of a list of countries Americans would least like to see have nuclear weapons, and the reasons for apprehension have deepened dramatically in the past year with the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran under the mullahs since the revolution of 1979 has been a weird and ominous country. With Ahmadinejad’s new prominence, the weirdness quotient has reached new levels. Iran is now headed by an individual who expresses the hope that Israel be wiped off the map and denies that the Holocaust ever occurred. Those are sentiments not found in civilized [...]
Elbowed out of the headlines by North Korea’s nuclear test, U.N. peacekeeping forces have continued to expand their presence in southern Lebanon in an atmosphere that is both nervous and uneventful, according to official reports from the area Monday. Troops from Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and other European countries have been arriving in Lebanon since early September, and taking up positions in the south alongside the Lebanese army. Their role is to ensure observance of the mid-August cease-fire that ended the 34 days of fierce fighting between Israel and Hezbollah fighters. With Iran defying admonitions by the U.N. Security Council [...]
The merger announced last month by Ayman al-Zawahiri between al-Qaida and Algeria’s GSPC represents a significant strategic move by the al-Qaida leadership. It is the latest example of a new chapter in al-Qaida’s efforts to both outsource operations and more aggressively re-brand once autonomous or loosely affiliated groups. It is a well-known fact that al-Qaida has become highly decentralized in the years since 9/11 and the fundamental nature of the organization has changed dramatically. With no physical base from which to draw and train recruits or launch attacks, and with its hierarchy severely damaged, the role of al-Qaida-central (as some [...]
