By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Lindsey Graham has been posing as the voice of reason in the Republican Party for the past few weeks, warning Tuesday that if Donald Trump gets the Republican nomination and Hillary Clinton is the Democratic standard-bearer, then “crazy loses to dishonest” in the public’s eye. There […]
Russia open to “Federal” Syria, but opposition worries about Partition
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Russian deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov said Monday that Russia supports whatever arrangements the Syrians in the current negotiations reach about the future, included a possible federal state. The United States has a federal system, which means that individual states retain a certain amount of autonomy, […]
“Tehran is liberated territory” as Pragmatists & Centrists win Iranian Capital & Expert Assembly
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The era of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also a former mayor of Tehran, is completely over. Ahmadinejad’s so-called spiritual mentor, Mohammad-Taqi Misbah-Yazdi (actually an extremely hateful individual), lost his seat on the Assembly of Experts, as did far right figure Mohammad Yazdi, the body’s sitting […]
How Much will Iran Change after Ayatollah Khamenei?
By Golnaz Esfandiari | ( RFE/RL ) | – – The succession question in Iran has come to the fore recently with the election of a new Assembly of Experts, the 88-member chamber of (male) theologians who pick and nominally oversee the work of the country's supreme leader. Speculation mounted about potential successors to Supreme […]
Syrian Ceasefire: A Signal that Russia is winning the War?
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Whether or not the cessation of hostilities in Syria holds, it is a major turning point in the revolution and civil war that began in 2011. As of Saturday morning in Syria, the major fronts between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood factions were quiet. There […]
Iran Election Results Show that when US rewards Pragmatists, they Win
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Early results in Iran’s parliamentary elections suggest that the centrists, pragmatists and independents will have more seats than the Khomeinist far right. For the first time since the 1979 revolution, no one bloc will dominate the national legislature. The far right had had 66% of the […]
Rubio’s 7 Fallacies on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – In last night’s Republican debate co-sponsored by Telemundo, billionaire bigot Donald Trump, usually a resident of Mars, briefly came back to earth long enough to suggest he could broker a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians by being even-handed. It is not a matter, he […]
Kerry warns of break up of Syria; but is that Realistic?
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Amid ongoing talks in Geneva around a cessation of hostilities in Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday night in a joint telephone call with other diplomats, “It may be too late to keep it as a whole Syria if we wait much longer.” The […]
How the US went Fascist: Mass media Makes excuses for Trump Voters
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The rise of Donald Trump to the presumptive Republican standard bearer for president in 2016 is an indictment of, and a profound danger to the American republic. The Founding Fathers were afraid of the excitability of the voters and their vulnerability to the appeal of demagogues. […]
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