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      Trump's Threats Towards Iran Aren't Working. Here's Why.

      Trump's Threats Towards Iran Aren't Working. Here's Why.

      By treating the Iranian regime as a monolith the Trump Administration risks closing one of the few remaining avenues for defusing the crisis

      Stephen Zunes
      Medea Benjamin
      Jul 18, 2019

      The Trump Administration has imposed sanctions against more than 1,000 Iranian entities, including Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, targeting almost every significant sector of that nation's economy. But recently it reversed course, backing off its threat to sanction a top Iranian diplomat, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in response to concerns that it would foreclose any diplomatic recourse.

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      Targeting Zarif--who lived in the United States for thirty years, including high school, college, and graduate school--is particularly ironic, given that he is a leading moderate voice in Tehran. Unlike most autocratic regimes, where power is centralized in a political party, a military junta, or a single dictator, Iran's government is divided between conservative clerics, the moderate president, the military, the parliament, and other forces.

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      Opinion
      Is a War With Iran on the Horizon?

      Is a War With Iran on the Horizon?

      The Trump administration is reckless enough to turn the Cold War with Iran into a hot one

      Bob Dreyfuss
      Mar 11, 2019

      Here's the foreign policy question of questions in 2019: Are President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, all severely weakened at home and with few allies abroad, reckless enough to set off a war with Iran? Could military actions designed to be limited -- say, a heightening of the Israeli bombing of Iranian forces inside Syria, or possible U.S. cross-border attacks from Iraq, or a clash between American and Iranian naval ships in the Persian Gulf -- trigger a wider war?

      Worryingly, the answers are: yes and yes. Even though Western Europe has lined up in opposition to any future conflict with Iran, even though Russia and China would rail against it, even though most Washington foreign policy experts would be horrified by the outbreak of such a war, it could happen.

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      Opinion
      Boys Go to Baghdad, Real Men Go to Tehran

      Boys Go to Baghdad, Real Men Go to Tehran

      It may be that the next greatest U.S. failure will be to allow the sort of people who pulled the country into folly in 2003 to come back in 2018 to do the same elsewhere.

      Shervin Malekzadeh
      Jun 15, 2018

      The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was as much a domestic initiative as it was a foreign policy endeavor, as analysts such as Reza Marashi and Ariane Tabatabai have been saying. It's a way for the Iranian leadership to come to terms with its own crimes and mistakes during the catastrophic presidency of Iran's tin-pot clown, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. By pursuing the nuclear deal and a normalized portfolio of relations with Europe and the United States, President Hassan Rouhani and Ayatollah Ali Khamanei sought to secure the revolution by preventing a repeat of the Ahmadinejad years and the return of the hard line.

      Repetition appears to be an enduring condition of Iran-US relations. Late in 2003, with the war in Iraq just entering its insurgent stage, the refrain "boys go to Baghdad, but real men go to Tehran" gained circulation within neoconservative circles. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein was to be the first step in a wider transformation. Plenty of men and women did go to Iraq, good Americans sent to fight in a bad war. They went in numbers not nearly enough to meet the need for the next war, if and when it should come to Iran.

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      Opinion
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