Independent voices from the TWT Communities
As U.S. political leaders rebuked Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi on Sunday for his decree to assume sweeping new powers, police in central Cairo fired tear gas at protesters who accused him of a blatant power grab.
The leader of an Iranian militant group that was taken off the U.S. terror list on Friday says the move will change her group's "balance of power" with the world — predicting a higher profile in politics, fundraising and diplomacy and increased anti-regime activity in Iran.
Iran's nuclear ambitions predate the clerical dictatorship that overthrew the monarchy in 1979. The last monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, reached the same conclusion when Britain, in 1968, suddenly relinquished all of its geopolitical responsibilities east of Suez - from Singapore to the Suez Canal, including the Persian Gulf and the oil that then fueled most of the Western world.
Overlooked in the welter of fast-moving events throughout the Arab world was a Saudi Arabian call for transforming the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council into "an entity identical to the [27-nation] European Union" - plus nuclear weapons.
Abbas Milani has taken on a hard task: to explain how and why the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919-1980) in Iran came to an inglorious and messy end.
'Reprehensible' Iran
'Reprehensible' Iran
A new strategy is needed to effectuate regime change in Iran. Experience and history discredit the longstanding mix of escalating economic sanctions combined with $75 million publicly appropriated by Congress for regime change proponents.
Iran is using newly created front companies in a bid to frustrate U.S. and United Nations sanctions on its suspect nuclear programs, according to records and information supplied by a leading Iranian exile dissident group.
In 1972, the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi told this reporter that Iran would one day be a nuclear power.
