In February 2005 I wrote about Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech helping out Iranian hardliners. Four months later Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a landslide against the far more moderate Rafsanjani. Four years later we've got a new president and Iran will hold a new election on June 12And that's why I'm viewing the Iranian election as a bit of a referendum on ( Read more... )

Every so often in one of my friends mentions something about going to war with Iran, so I am posting this to link back to later. Short answer: I think this is very unlikely for several reasons ( Read more... )

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been visiting our country this week. This gives me a good excuse to write up a report on some of the misconceptions that I think our country has about Iran and its leader.

Ahmadinejad is a powerful political figure but he does not have absolute power - he's not even in the top tier. Like the French prime minister, ( Read more... )

swingland asked for this:

Message of H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
To the American People

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I was going over my old posts and remembered the Iran Holocaust Cartoon Contest. Does anyone know if the winners have been announced yet?

I'm absolutely captivated by this interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He dismisses the supposedly biased, fragmentary, inconclusive evidence to support the existence of the Holocaust using exactly the same tricks that cigarette companies used to dismiss evidence linking smoking and cancer, that anti-environmental pundits use to dismiss the link ( Read more... )

An excerpt from General Barry McCaffrey's memo addressed to the heads of the social science department at West Point:

U.S. public diplomacy and rhetoric about confronting Iranian nuclear weapons is scaring neighbors in the Gulf. They will not support another war.. They have no integrated missile and interceptor air defense. They have no ( Read more... )

In an article about a British SAS soldier refusing to fight in Iraq, British Foreign Office minister Kim Howells says:

"People describe Iraq as a mess," he said. "But it is a mess that can't launch an attack now on Iran...

...on the same day that the Pentagon is talking about launching an attack on Iran.

Hamshahri, an Iranian newspaper, is attempting to question the legitimacy of offensive political speech by sponsoring a nationwide contest over who can create the most offensive holocaust cartoon.

I think this is pretty awesome. It's like the cast of The Aristocrats staged a coup in Iran and elected Abbie Hoffman president. This has the ( Read more... )