Syria: a victim of Iran once again
The international community is prioritizing Iran over action in Syria, costing lives every day, writes Tariq Alhomayed in Asharq Alawsat.
What is most likely is that Iran has now become the focal point for Washington, behind Israel of course, which has been exerting pressure upon the United States in this regard. This issue is now more pressing than what the tyrant of Damascus is doing to the unarmed Syrians, especially if we remember that Iran comes before al-Assad, the tyrant comes before Hezbollah, and so on.
Crisis-Managing U.S.-Iran Relations
Gary G. Sick talks to the Council on Foreign Relations about the significance of the recent Iranian parliamentary elections, and best way to move ahead in nuclear negotiations.
The presence of the United States across the negotiating table from Iran is crucial. It doesn’t have to be bilateral, but basically the United States has to be fully on board in any decision that is taken, in any position that is negotiated. The Iranians know that, and so does everybody else. My favorite negotiating process is not necessarily the P5+1, but the United States representing itself and its allies through a mediator.
The Iranian president is the victim of a hardline trend among the country’s true rulers, writes Max Fisher in The Atlantic.
As increasingly crippling sanctions and the threat of an Israeli or U.S. military strike lead the Iranian regime to dig in, Tehran’s leaders appear more paranoid, more entrenched, and less willing to tolerate dissent than ever. This means locking up dissidents, bloggers, and activists, but it also means winding down Iran’s more democratic elements and unifying the government into something that more closely resembles a dictatorship.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Pakistan native Pir Zubair Shah offers an extensive look at the impact of American pilotless plane strikes against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in his country.
The drone campaign is one of the U.S. government’s most secret programs. Although the most authoritative study on the subject, by the New America Foundation last year, calculated that 283 drone strikes had occurred in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region since 2004, Obama never even publicly acknowledged them until this past January.
An Anti-Israel Activist’s Epiphany
The tone of the recent conference in Doha on the future of Jerusalem has shown even the most ardent of leftwing Israeli peaceniks the true face of the Arab world when it comes to Israel, writes David Meir-Levi for Front Page Magazine.
Just as a doctor must first correctly diagnose the illness before deciding how best to cure it, so too must political and intellectual actors in the West first understand the true nature of the Arab stand vis-a-vis Israel, the bona fide dynamics of the conflict, in order to unite in an effort to curtail the violence and implement strategies that will lead to peace and cooperative co-existence between Israel and its Arab neighbors and other Muslim countries worldwide. Thanks to Doha, it is now clear, at least to some for whom it was previously not clear, that pressing Israel for concessions will not lead to peace, precisely because the Arab side does not want peace.
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