Tehran

Hans Blix believes the Bush administration is courting catastrophe in its handling of Iran.  read more »

In the 15 years during which I more or less regularly conducted a column for this newspaper, I can&r  read more »

The Forward has a nice piece this week on how U.S. Rep. John Hall, rocker-turned-Congressman in the Hudson Valley, anchored his narrow victory over Republican Sue Kelly last year by winning the burgeoning Kiryas Joel compound of Orthodox Jews to his side, over a water-rights issue.

Good reporting. The Forward notes that the Israel issue doesn't matter that much to the Satmars, and I would add that Neturei Karta, the anti-Zionist Jews who actually care about atrocities against Arabs (and yes, went to Tehran recently for Ahmedinejad's anti-Holocaust show), is based in Monsey—in Hall's district, I believe. I hope Walt and Mearsheimer write about them; maybe that way the mainstream media would finally do the story.

To the Editor:    read more »

Holocaust denial is a particularly insidious evil.  read more »

Holocaust denial is a particularly insidious evil.  read more »

The SAT, that infamous rite of terror and No.  read more »

Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s widely covered and high-profile 12-day trip to the  read more »

If you ever needed a reminder of how important the realist intellectuals' spring assault on the Israel lobby is, today's Times bore it out. Its polls show that most Americans feel that Israel's indiscriminate destruction in Lebanon will lead to a wider war, and that we don't have a dog in that fight and shouldn't get involved. "Support for the president's staunch backing of Israel goes only so far..." intones the Times: 39 percent say they approve it, but 40 percent say we should be neutral on its latest conflict.

We are all realists now... Most of us anyway.

The poll underscores what the prescient David Brooks meant but refused to say openly some weeks back when he spoke in code about isolationist populists versus interventionist "elites" in foreign policy. Translation: The interventionist elites side with Israel all the way to the destruction of two Arab capitals, and Damascus and Tehran while we're at it. The isolationist populists are the American majority, burned by neocon delusions about Iraq, wary of getting involved in this unending cycle of violence that will only see an end when we exercise our power as the offshore balancer.

Brooks was talking in code because the politics of this are so frightening to the Brooks-Beinart elite. When you have an American groundswell saying one thing—Hizbullah is crazy, but so is Israel—and neither party representing those views, a Ross Perot could emerge, or some other demagogue. Who will respond to this feeling politically? Not the mainline Democrats. They demonstrated the power of the Israel lobby when they sandbagged Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki for criticizing Israeli "aggression" in Lebanon. While in Connecticut Ned Lamont is afraid to say a word against our Israel policy, till August 9 anyway.

Here's one flicker of light. Last night on Hardball, Republican strategist Ed Rogers sounded the majority position when he called the Israel-Lebanon fighting a "sideshow" that can "hurt America's interest in Iraq." The Democrats should never have confronted al-Maliki over his anti-Israel statements; they were acting "not in America's interest."

The invocation of an American interest that is not Israel's, by a political strategist—holy moly. If you can run against the gun lobby, why not the Israel lobby? I can't wait for October. Then maybe some gutty congressional aspirants will run on that idea, and find a movement behind them.

George Ajjan has an amusing item on Why Iran's President Ahmadinejad never wears a tie. Ajjan heard this from an unnamed Iranian friend:

Shortly after the revolution...the tie itself began being associated with "Western imperialism", especially after Ayatollah Khomeini branded a large group of intellectuals (who were less religiously zealous than he would have liked) as "tie-wearing cronies of the West" and essentially branded anyone wearing a tie as being Western influenced... Gradually, as Khomeini's legacy became a bit less overbearing, regular people stopped caring... ordinary people now wore ties on a regular basis. I myself for example, always wore tie at work in Tehran, as did many of my colleagues. I would actually make a point of wearing a tie outside as much as possible, to do my bit...

Two weeks back, Paul Krugman got off a brilliant stroke in the Times, when he cited that "peculiar rule, which still prevails in Washington, that you have to have been wrong about Iraq to be considered credible on national security."

The examples of this are legion. The author Peter Beinart, for instance, putting himself forth as an advocate for the use of force overseas after admitting, I got it wrong on Iraq. Sort of like a kid asking for matches after he burned now the neighbor's house. Shouldn't these people have a little humility? Does the suffering unleashed in Iraq mean nothing to them? Or do they rationalize it, saying, Oh it was inevitable when Saddam fell. Do any of them have family members at risk in these adventures?

Yesterday the Washington Post gave a platform to Richard Perle, once again lecturing us about a third force in Iran, and the dangers of appeasement:

A few days ago, I spoke with Amir Abbas Fakhravar, an Iranian dissident student leader who escaped first from Tehran's notorious Evin prison, then, after months in hiding, from Iran. Fakhravar...wonders whether... the proponents of accommodation with Tehran will regard the struggle for freedom in Iran as an obstacle to their new diplomacy.

Wait a second, didn't he just do that with Chalabi?

If they weren’t real, many of Mark Bowden’s characters would seem like the creations of a lazy H  read more »

If they weren’t real, many of Mark Bowden’s characters would seem like the creations of  read more »

A  read more »

A few weeks ago, Iranians living in the U.S.-or at least those known to the regime in Tehran-began r  read more »