Informed Comment: Global Affairs
Our new group blog, Informed Comment: Global Affairs has gotten favorable notice in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Speaking of which, contributors have made some very important entries in the past couple of days.
Barnett Rubin, among the world’s foremost experts on Afghanistan explains why he is a “pessoptimist” on the future of that country. He also describes how his commitments to Afghanistan’s well-being and his various diplomatic and business involvements make him in-between academia and other worlds on the issue. It is in my view great blogging– personal, autobiographical, whimsical, and yet deadly serious on subject of great import for the United States. We eagerly await more!
Farideh Farhi weighs in with an important posting on press censorship in Iran. The crackdown on the reformists initiated by President Mahmud Ahmadinejad after his summer, 2005, electoral victory continues apace, with the closure of the reformist Ham-Mihan newspaper, run by the former mayor of Tehran.
See also Dr. Farhi’s other recent piece, at Middle East Reports Online, on Iran’s security dilemma.
Departing BBC Tehran correspondent Frances Harrison gives her own impressions of the creeping press crackdown in Iran. It is obviously not a good scene.
On the other hand, Fatemeh Keshavarz, writing in the Chronicle, reminds of us how complex a culture Iran has, warning against a the New Orientalism of the Bernard Lewis variety.