America and Iran: At the Brink of the Abyss Day after day, I get more and more appalled by the prospect of an imminent nuclear attack on Iran; not only because I was raised in Iran and I do not want to see my 2,500-year-old country be destroyed by nukes, but also...
A few days ago, I was at lunch with a colleague, an ex-military man, and the talk got to politics. I mentioned that the government was never going to voluntarily shrink in size; it would only collapse in on itself through bankruptcy. He said that he had a lot of...
America's Sunni Islamist opponents must be ever more strongly sensing that Allah truly is on their side. Currently, this perception is due not only to the recent victory of the Islamist party Hamas in Palestine's parliamentary elections, but more especially because of...
One has only to look at the headlines coming out of Iraq to see that the moment of truth has arrived: the Iraqi government is warning of an "endless civil war"; mosques across Iraq, including the "Golden Mosque" in Samarra, were targeted in a wave...
On a cloudless day, the sky a brilliant, late-afternoon blue, my car winds its way up the Berkeley hills. Plum and pear trees in glorious whites and pinks burst into sight at each turn in the road. Beds of yellow flowers, trees hung with lemons, and the odd palm are...
In Yemen, every government institution – the military, enforcement agencies, courts, detention centers, etc. – is under the strict control of the dictatorship. The prison from which the 23 al-Qaeda members escaped is known as the detention center for...
Hamas' history is deeply intertwined with the last stretch of Arafat's life and his sudden death. It was the disappearance of Arafat's secret treasury (estimated between $700 million and $2 billion) that paved the way to Hamas' recent victory in the Palestinian...
The Greenies aren't particularly upset with President Bush for launching – on false pretenses – an unauthorized war of aggression against Iraq three years ago. Nevertheless, the Greenies are extremely upset with Bush. Why? Well, for one thing, up until now,...
Fifty years ago today, Nikita Khrushchev gave his Secret Speech to the Closed Session of the Twentieth Party Congress in which he denounced Joseph Stalin. At that time, Khrushchev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held the most...
WASHINGTON - Two days after the bombing of one of Shia Islam's holiest shrines in Iraq, analysts and officials here are holding their breath, desperately hoping that a rapid descent into a sectarian civil war in Iraq can still be avoided, if not reversed. While a...
