Iran

On March 7, 2006, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon addressed the Hudson Institute. General Yaalon, a distinguished military fellow at The Washington Institute, is the former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff. The following is the prepared text of General Yaalon’s speech. Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Islamist

While international attention is focused on Iran's nuclear program and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's bombast, Iranian society itself is facing turbulent times. Increasingly, patterns are re-emerging that mirror events in the years before the Islamic revolution. These include political disillusionment, domestic protest, government failure to match public expectations of economic success

In his January 31 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush declared that America was "addicted to oil" and urged spending on technologies "to break [that] addiction." Noting that oil is often imported from unstable parts of the world, he set a goal of replacing more than 75

Testimony before the House Committee on Armed Services Conclusions Efforts to deter and contain a nuclear Iran would likely encounter significant challenges. The nature of the Islamic Republic, regional politics, and Iran’s involvement in terrorism make establishing a stable deterrent relationship with a nuclear Iran risky and uncertain. The experience

Iran's move yesterday to restart work at the controversial Natanz uranium enrichment plant is extremely rash. Even the normally urbane Mohammed El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said "the world was running out of patience" with Iran. Tehran, under the leadership of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, appears

At the annual summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), held in Abu Dhabi on December 18 and 19, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Oman avoided confronting Iran directly on its suspected nuclear weapons program. Instead, these member states confronted Israel

After a period of some tolerance under former president Mohammad Khatami, Iran is now experiencing a cultural clampdown. President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad is implementing the hardest of hardline ideological tendencies in the cultural arena, consistent with his belief that his administration should prepare the country for the reappearance of the hidden

Mohsen Sazegara, recently a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute and now at Yale University, posted on several Persian-language websites (including gooya.com) a long open letter to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Hossein Khamenei. Below are translated extracts from that letter. Dear Mr. Khamenei: Let go of these strange thoughts

Exploring continuities and changes, this book provides the historical backdrop crucial to understanding how Iranian pride and sense of victimization combine to make its politics contentious and potentially dangerous. From the struggle between the Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini to the current tension between the reformers and traditionalists, a central issue