The impact of U.S. sanctions against Iran and other state sponsors of terrorism have been undermined by loopholes that allow exemptions for humanitarian, agricultural and medical exports, according to a report in The New York Times. Most of the loopholes were created by a 2000 law that created exemptions for …
The sudden firing of Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki while he was abroad on a diplomatic mission lying for his country is a sign of growing political tension within Iran’s increasingly isolated government. The abrupt sacking of Mottaki, who has served as Iran’s top diplomat since the installation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s …
Today, representatives of Iran and the P5 + 1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) convened for talks on Iran’s nuclear program in Geneva. These are the first face-to-face talks on that subject for 14 months. Iran’s unpredictable regime broke off talks last year after …
The illegal revelation of more than 250,000 State Department documents last weekend by the WikiLeaks organization is a damaging setback for U.S. foreign policy that will strain relations with important U.S. allies, undermine U.S. national security interests, and complicate international cooperation on many issues, including the war on terrorism. This …
Congressional sources say that the Obama Administration has pulled out all the stops in its lobbying campaign to secure Senate approval of the New START Treaty by warning Israel’s supporters in Congress that failure to approve the treaty will undermine Israeli security by causing Russia to reduce its support for …
If the standoff over continued Israeli settlements in the West Bank continues, the Palestinian Authority has threatened to abandon negotiations with Israel and appeal to the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian State within the territory that Israel occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Such a unilateral move by the …
Buried in the WikiLeaks avalanche of documents related to the war in Iraq are various reports about the discovery of chemical weapons caches inside Iraq—reports which contradict the revisionist narrative about the genesis of the war. Scattered throughout the roughly 392,000 documents illegally published by WikiLeaks are accounts of U.S., …
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez wrapped up a two day visit to Iran with a flurry of official agreements and rhetorical broadsides denouncing the United States. Chavez, visiting Iran for the ninth time as President, lauded his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and proclaimed that bilateral ties are “solid and very, very …
In a provocative and divisive two day state visit to Lebanon last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad basked in the adulation of Lebanese Shiite crowds assembled by his Hezbollah allies. Ahmadinejad’s controversial trip was designed to: bolster his status as a world leader at a time when he increasingly is …