Tag Archives: Iran

All you need to know about Mike Pompeo, the four-term congressman from Kansas who is actually from California, is that most of his life he has been in business with the Koch brothers. His appointment as Secretary of State puts a seal on Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accords.... Informed CommentPompeo, Big Oil and the attack on Iran Deal Juan ColeAlsoThe Anti-MediaExperts Warn Pick of Mike Pompeo Increases Odds of US Attacking Iran  Jon QueallyAlsoLobeLogPompeo: Springtime for...

While the West is all in a huff about repression of women in Iran over the headscarf law, women occupy senior positions in industry and government. Invited to Paris by the French-Iranian Center along with some 30 Iranian business leaders, the aeronautical engineer sought to break the clichés about the Iranian women. Translated excerpts from the interview follow:LE POINT: An Iranian woman as a chief executive … Is this not contradictory?SHARAFBAFI: No, I don’t see any contradiction...

Crosspost of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson's op-ed in the New York Times.Russia InsiderI Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It’s Happening Again.Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, US Army (ret.)

While audiences of Western media may be seeing the group, they aren’t actually being provided the proper context of who the MEK and NCRI are. Instead, MEK protests are being shown across Western media as “anti-regime” protests representative of the general mood of Iranians. The problem with these protests — which have been highlighted by outlets like Fox, Salon, and Vox — is that they aren’t actually taking place in Iran. Instead of highlighting the concerns of the legitimate protests in...

Taken together, the Trump strategy is clever two-pronged approach that shrinks capital investment in the country (thereby strangling the economy) while increasing the incitements that are intended to cause the government to overreact and (possibly) scuttle the agreement. Trump’s goal is to trick Iran into terminating the deal because it would be too costly for the US to end its commitment unilaterally.…  The Unz ReviewTrump’s Sinister Plan to Kill the Iranian “Nukes” Deal Mike Whitney...

When it comes to covering protests in other countries, it seems any vague picture of brown people protesting can stand in for those actually on the streets expressing their grievances. Since the outbreak of protests across Iran three weeks ago, several major outlets have used pictures of demonstrations in the United States, France, or United Kingdom—organized by a fringe, cult-like group, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK)—in place of images of the entirely unaffiliated protesters, 6,000 miles away,...

Backgrounder.Graham E. FullerIran—On the Brink?Graham E. Fuller | adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University, formerly vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, and a former senior political scientist at RAND

In a swipe at his hardline rivals, President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday young Iranian protesters were unhappy about far more than just the economy and they would no longer defer to the views and lifestyle of an aging revolutionary elite.... Iran is already a lot more liberal than Wahabi-Salafist states like Saudi Arabia. It is also democratic, where as the others are hereditary monarchies. What makes Islamic countries Islamic states is that they recognize Islamic law. Iran is hardly...

A vacuum of information is created which, at a moment of intense international interest, is going to be filled with dubious stories from partisan sources. Never let a good crisis go to waste. The Independent (UK)When it comes to the Iran protests, be careful who you put your trust in Patrick Cockburn Also A truism about U.S. politics and media is that once a foreign leader or a country has been demonized everything written or said about the subject will be skewed to the negative, a rule...

Not a bad article considering that Project Syndicate is an organ of the corporate elite. The author does recognize that the economic protest is the result of President Rouhani's neoliberal program to deliver the promised increase in prosperity that neoliberals assume to be widely distribute by trickle down. So, even though the article is written from the neoliberal point of view, it does admit the failure of neoliberal reformers to deliver on their promises to the country as a whole,...