As Barnett Rubin notes at the Global Affairs blog, Haleh Esfandiari has been allowed to leave Iran and has met her husband, Shaul Bakhash, in Vienna. I am so happy that my friend is free, though I regret the continued imprisonment of three other Iranian-American intellectuals (not to mention many, many prisoners of conscience.) And, […]
Archives for September 2007
Maliki: Don’t Use Iraq as a Base to settle Scores US Pressures Bagdad to stop visit of Iranian President
Sawt al-Iraq reports in Arabic that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has pledged not to allow Iraq to become a base for regional or international powers to settle scores. (This announcement seems to me to be an attempt to forewarn the Bush administration that it may not use Iraq as a base for an attack on […]
Bush and Ahmadinejad: Will they or Won’t They?
More from Barnett Rubin on signs of a potential Bush administration attack on Iran at the Global Affairs blog. He quotes Alex Debat from the Times of London: “the Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive air strikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days.”
Maliki Blames Wahhabis for Karbala Sistani Aide Assassinated
The Shiite world has been roiled for weeks by statements of Saudi, Wahhabi clergy in Mecca that Shiite shrines are works of idolatry and should be pulled down. Prime Minsiter Nuri al-Maliki used these anxieties politically to explain the violence at Karbala on Tuesday. Problem: the violence in Karbala was between two factions of Shiites […]
Maliki breaks with, Jails Mahdi Army 300 Arrested in Karbala
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered the arrest of 300 persons in Karbala connected to the Mahdi Army on Friday, blaming it for the outbreak of violence in the holy Shiite city on Tuesday. Apparently many of the arrests were arbitrary in the sense that being in the Mahdi Army was the basis for the arrest […]
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