Iran Archive

At first glance, the power struggle currently taking place among Iran’s ruling elites might seem bizarre. After all, it is not often that the chief executive of a 21st-century nation is accused of “witchcraft,” “experimenting with exorcism” and “communicating with genies.” Mullahs have tarred Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration as containing “deviants, devils and evil spirits.” Ahmadinejad responded that his opponents have launched a “conspiracy” to undo socio-economic changes beneficial to most Iranians. At the heart of the widening dispute is Ahmadinejad’s increasing independence from the system of “velayat-e faqih,” or guardianship of the — religious — jurist, on which […]

There’s an emerging consensus that, after a promising start, Turkey has had a bad Arab Spring. Anthony Shadid suggested yesterday in the New York Times that the unrest threatens Turkey’s newfound regional influence, while Steven Cook argued in Foreign Policy that the Arab uprisings represent a kind of “emperor has no clothes” moment for Ankara, exposing the hollowness underlying Turkey’s much-vaunted rise. I’d like to weigh in on this, especially since I recently flagged the Turkish Model as a promising foreign policy approach for Egypt, the Palestinians and the region in general. Clearly, Turkey miscalculated on Libya, as Cook makes […]

The recent events in the Arab world and Iran have led many in the West to urge President Barack Obama to take a stronger stance against human right abuses in Iran. The Obama administration should resist this temptation, as doing so would only serve to weaken Iran’s domestic opposition. As the popular uprisings in the Middle East have demonstrated, revolutions are most successful when they are organic. The voices calling on the Obama administration to give greater attention to human rights abuses in Iran have been forceful and diverse. A Washington Post editorial from last month, for instance, told the […]

Not surprisingly, people in the Taliban-controlled areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border have turned out — some of their own volition, many under duress — to mourn Osama bin Laden’s death and to threaten the United States and its allies. Yet, as a Pew survey documented, the idolization once lavished upon bin Laden seems to have waned in recent years among Muslim polities. The sociopolitical change now being sought by Middle Eastern masses protesting their countries’ secular and religious autocracies is a far cry from the caliphate that bin Laden envisioned. Islamist militant groups like Hamas in Gaza have condemned the […]