Iran

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Iran’s southwestern Khuzestan region, the center of its petroleum industry, has been wracked with protests for a week, in part over water shortages. Rallies have erupted in the towns of Mahshahr, Izeh, Ahvaz, Kut-e Abdollah, Susangerd, Aligoudarz and Shoushtar, according to Amnesty International The Iranian government has sometimes replied to […]

Featured

Iran opens new Oil Port on Gulf of Oman to avoid narrow Straits of Hormuz and to Avoid US Sanctions

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – According to Al Jazeera, on Thursday, Iran announced the opening of a new petroleum export terminal near the port of Jask on the Gulf of Oman, which will allow its vessels to avoid what Iranians refer to as the Persian Gulf and its narrow outlet, the Strait of Hormuz. Although […]

Iran

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Muslim Secularism: A conversation with Juan Cole (Ta’seel)

Juan Cole

Juan Cole in conversation with Ta’seel Commons: “’To read Juan Cole’s deft, plain-spoken translation of the Rubáiyát is to find companionship, to rejoin a thousand-year human conversation about how to endure, enjoy, and find a fleeting beauty in everlastingly dire times. The lucid, cogent and mind-opening Epilogue is a kind of grace, a gift freely […]

Donald Trump

Did Netanyahu Try to get Trump to Wag the Dog with Strike on Iran after Biden Won?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Susan B. Glasser reports at The New Yorker that after it became clear that Joe Biden had won the presidency, from November 7, lame duck Donald Trump desperately wanted to hold on to his office and contemplated a strike on Iran to bolster his position. Glasser writes that “the subject […]

Iran

America’s Afghan War Is Over, So What About Iraq – and Iran?

Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold

( Code Pink) – At Bagram air-base, Afghan scrap merchants are already picking through the graveyard of U.S. military equipment that was until recently the headquarters of America’s 20-year occupation of their country. Afghan officials say the last U.S. forces slipped away from Bagram in the dead of night, without notice or coordination. The Taliban […]

Iran

Iranian Voters sent a Message to Iran’s Leaders with Dismal Turnout For Presidential Election

Golnaz Esfandiari

( RFE/RL) – The Iranian leadership has a problem: a record number of voters — more than half of them — turned their back on the presidential election by not taking part in the vote. Official turnout in the June 18 election was 48.8 percent, the lowest ever registered in the Islamic republic, which was […]

China

Biden is a Transformative President Domestically, but from China to Iran he embraces the Same old Washington Militarism

John Feffer

America is back–to the same old, same old. ( Foreign Policy in Focus ) -On the domestic front, Joe Biden is flirting with transformational policies around energy, environment, and infrastructure. It’s not a revolution, but it’s considerably less timid than what Barack Obama offered in that pre-Trump, pre-pandemic era. When it comes to foreign policy, […]

censorship

America wants to be known in Mideast as Champion of Free Speech, so Why is it Censoring Iranian Websites?

Farhang Jahanpour

Oxford (Special to Informed Comment) – The Bureau of Industry and Security, an agency of the United States Department of Justice, in a statement on Tuesday 22 June announced that it had seized 33 websites and news outlets used by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU), and another three run by the “Iran-backed” […]

Iran

Iran’s Hardliners: We’re Back, Too

John Feffer

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – To some critics, U.S. elections are managed affairs. According to this cynical view, the “powers that be” narrow the field of candidates, the two parties don’t represent the real range of public opinion in the country, and periodic elections are just shadow plays staged by powerbrokers behind the […]