Archives for 2009

CNN reports that nearly one in four human beings is Muslim, based on a new extensive survey by the Pew Forum for Religion in Public Life. The number of Muslims they estimate, about 1.5 billion, is the one I have been using for some time based on my own back of the napkin calculations, but […]

Another big explosion has rocked Kabul, killing several persons and wounding more. I don’t know if Peter Galbraith still has a job at the United Nations after he went public with charges that the Electoral Complaints Commission, mainly appointed by the UN, was ignoring large-scale fraud in the August 20 presidential elections, fraud that mainly […]

You get your pick of polls on the Afghanistan war this morning. AP-GfK found only 40% of Americans any longer support the war, though they back sending one-off expeditionary forces to fight specific terrorist threats. Quinnipiac found a slight majority still in favor of the war. Widely diverging results such as this one suggest either […]

Nasrine Gross writes in a guest op-ed for IC Friends & Colleagues, I have just returned from Kabul. And I am shocked how little the extent of fraud in the presidential elections is understood outside Afghanistan. In this regard I have some data that I would like to share. During the summer and up until […]

When you tool around the blogosphere and the news sites, the discourse about Iran’s nuclear program is maddeningly contradictory. But I think a single hypothesis can account for all the known facts. These are: 1. Iran is making a drive to close the fuel cycle and to be capable of independently enriching uranium to at […]

On Saturday morning, a force of some 300 guerrillas attacked a US outpost and an Afghan police outpost in Nuristan. They killed 8 US troops and two Afghan police, but failed to overwhelm the bastions, and had to withdraw in the face of withering US air power once it arrived. Some of the fighters are […]

Some random anonymous person got posted over at Daily Dish who critiqued my column on the top things you think about Iran that are not true. This person pretended to refute my column, but as is typical in propaganda, he really only harped on a few minor details and said nothing about the column’s larger […]

International Atomic Energy Agency official Mohammad Elbaradei arrived in Tehran on Saturday to begin making preparations for the inspection of Iran’s new nuclear research facility near Qom. The NYT reports that an internal IAEA report concludes that Iran now has the data to construct a nuclear weapon. Which means that there is no point in […]

The US plan to place further sanctions on Iran for its nuclear energy research program may founder at the United Nations Security Council because of the reluctance of Russia and China to see the sanctions ratcheted up. Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed cautious optimism on Friday on the Iran issue: He said, “The agreements […]