Iranian president-elect Hassan Rohani has urged the West to talk to the Iranian nation fairly and respect the Islamic Republic’s rights in order to receive an appropriate response. ››read more

TEHRAN (ISNA)- The Iranian president-elect Hassan Rouhani who formerly, served as Supreme National Security Council Secretary (SNSC), reiterated that massive turnouts of Iranians in the 11th presidential election indicated the nation's solidarity and unity to the world.
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This year’s Iranian presidential election is likely to produce a strong political figure who will have a significant impact on the Islamic Republic’s foreign and domestic policies, helping to ensure Iran’s continued internal development and bolstering its regional importance. Yet every four years, a combustible mix of pro-Israel advocates, Iranian expatriates, Western Iran “experts,” and their fellow travelers in the media try to use Iranian presidential elections as a frame for persuading Westerners that the Islamic Republic is an illegitimate system so despised by its people as to be at imminent risk of overthrow. ››read more

U.S. support for the Syrian opposition was about two things. One was to use the opposition to bring down the Assad government, to (in their calculation) damage Iran’s regional position. Secondly, it was about coopting the Arab Awakening: to show that after the loss of pro-Western regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, a near-miss in Bahrain, that it wasn’t just authoritarian regimes that subordinated their foreign policies to the United States that were at risk from the Arab Awakening—that you could also bring down a regime that had a clear commitment to foreign policy independence. ››read more

The campaign to elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's successor as Iranian president is well under way. The eight candidates took part in a TV debate on cultural policies yesterday, with a further debate scheduled before the vote takes place on 14 June. ››read more

Our experience in the U.S. government—running from roughly the period of the first Gulf War in the early 1990s until March 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, when we left our positions at the White House on the National Security Council staff—effectively spanned the high-water mark of American primacy in the Middle East. In an interview for the University of California’s Conversations with History series, we discuss how our government service gave us “ringside seats” to watch as “the United States really misused that primacy, misused its supremacy in ways that were grossly counterproductive for its own interests, and for America’s standing in international affairs.” We also reflect on how our experience in government has both prompted and helped us to explore the ways in which succumbing to an “imperial temptation” in the Middle East distorts American perceptions of the region and warps U.S. policy outcomes. ››read more

John Mundy, the last Canadian ambassador to Iran, writes that the Canadian Foreign Minister Baird's hawkish position on Iran has prevented real solutions from being considered, and notes that Iran had already accepted many of the demands placed on its nuclear program ››read more

The United States House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Relations passed a bill on May 22, 2013, which has paved the way for the US President Barak Obama to enforce new sanctions against all companies conducting transactions with Iran regardless of the type of their transactions and the size of those companies. ››read more

The Congressmen were told that Iran is “isolated”. In reality, Iran maintains full diplomatic relations with some 100 states. Iran’s Foreign Minister is received courteously almost everywhere in Asia and Europe apart from the UK and Israel. Just this week Iran assumed the chair of the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Currently Iran presides over the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement ››read more

Earlier this week, the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT sponsored an event, “Iran and American Foreign Policy: Where Did the US Go Wrong?”, featuring Noam Chomsky and the two of us. The event was moderated by Prof. Ali Banuazizi of Boston College. ››read more

In testimony to Congress on Wednesday, Obama's State Department official Wendy Sherman reiterated the administration's policy on Iran. Since the intelligence community has concluded for some time now that Iran has not yet decided to pursue nuclear weapons, Sherman felt compelled to recite a litany of supposed Iranian transgressions to justify America's harsh economic sanctions and overall belligerence toward the country.

Every major criticism of Iran, though, is one that can also be lodged against the United States. ››read more

Iran should take part in an international conference agreed by Moscow and Washington to help broker an end to the Syria conflict, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov insisted in an interview broadcast Thursday. ››read more

If you look at the Balkans, if you look at Iraq, if you look at what we did in Libya, if you look at what we say we want to do in Syria—in every one of those cases, the argument for humanitarian intervention is inextricably bound up with the argument for coercive regime change. Frankly, I think Russia and China are eminently justified in saying that they’re not going to enable that.” ››read more

In an excellent report released last month, the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) offered a thoroughly documented—and devastating—critique of mainstream media coverage of the Iranian nuclear issue. Authored by Jonas Siegel and Saranaz Barforoush, Media Coverage of Iran’s Nuclear Program: An Analysis of U.S. and U.K. Coverage, 2009-2012, see here, reviews coverage of Iran’s nuclear activities and the international controversy surrounding those activities in six major English-language newspapers: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and the Independent. ››read more

Some human rights groups, especially Amnesty International, seem to have forgotten an important human right: peace. A petition has been launched to remind them. ››read more

By once again blowing the chance to close a nuclear deal with Iran, the U.S. and its western partners have set themselves up for escalating the conflict with the Islamic republic ››read more

Political motive revealed after Cambridge University first claimed scientist's non-attendance was on medical grounds ››read more

Israeli commentator Meir Javedanfar has made a very successful career of trafficking conventional wisdom and mainstream narratives about Iran’s nuclear program.

In a recent op-ed for the Guardian newspaper he has insisted – as he has done for years now – that the economic warfare and collective punishment exacted upon Iran at the behest of the United States and Israel is a beneficial policy that has made the Iranian government more malleable and amenable to Western diktat over its uranium enrichment program. ››read more

"The billions of dollars we are lavishing on the B61 is criminal. This is billions of dollars spent on a weapon whose mission evaporated at the end of the cold war. It's clearly aimed at buying senators" ››read more

The Syrian conflict has been accompanied by a distinct media narrative. Within this narrative - which poses a binary division between the forces engaged in the conflict, identifying the players as good (the rebels, who must receive 'our' support) and bad (the government) - the role the West must play is that of potential saviour, whose aim is to cautiously observe the conflict so that it may intervene to 'fix' the situation, as The Guardian's Simon Tisdall put it:

"So what can Obama do? As Vladimir Putin was expected to make plain to John Kerry in Moscow on Tuesday, he cannot count on Russian (or, therefore, Chinese or UN security council) support to fix Syria." ››read more