If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Only a few hours following Rouhani's victory, too many governments directly tackled the nuclear issue within the few lines of their communiqués. The Iranians just got out of an election, Rouhani won: congratulations!
Qatar has embarked on an ambitious plan to ensure that public and private schools in the Arab Gulf emirate are fully media and information literate by 2014. It is also aiming further afield to reach institutions in the Middle East and Africa.
Those data that are reported tend to possess what I've described as an "Alice in Wonderland" quality. In light of this, it is fair to suggest that any official data on Iran's inflation be taken with a grain of salt. So, how can this problem be overcome?
Obama's proposal to take sides in the Syrian war is wrong. It is arrogant. It ignores our destructive history in the Middle East and the perception by all parties in the region that everything we do there is motivated by our blatant bias toward Israel.
In a bid to distract attention from his domestic woes, curry favor with the U.S. and Gulf countries and restore Egypt to a leadership position in the region, Morsi chose a Cairo stadium to announce to his supporters that he was cutting diplomatic ties with the Syrian regime.
Could John McCain or Mitt Romney have gotten away with what President Barack Obama is doing? Where Democrats once feverishly denounced the actions of George W. Bush, they are now eerily silent when their own candidate behaves in much the same way as his predecessor.
One can debate whether America should insert itself militarily into the Syrian conflict. It is far less debatable that by selling weapons to al-Assad, Russia has precipitated Obama's recent decision to arm the Syria rebels, initiating an American role in this military conflict.
Sitting down on the bus carrying us out through the stunning Darbyshire countryside to a cavern where we would watch an Opening Night film for the Sheffield Doc Fest, little did I know what the woman sitting next to me would come to represent for me.
More than one million Syrians have now been forced to leave their country because of conflict; with millions more displaced inside Syria. They need our help now, and they will need our help for years to come.
For defense contractors, the government officials who write them mega checks, and the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the game is threat inflation. And no one has been better at it than the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton.
We should not close our eyes to genocide and injustice, just as we shouldn't ignore world hunger or disease. But we do need to understand what works and what doesn't.
If the Obama administration wants to engage a new Rohani administration effectively, and to put U.S.-Iranian relations on a more positive trajectory, it will need to overhaul U.S. policy in four fundamental ways.
Recent developments and atmospherics may presage closer cooperation between Russia and Turkey, and probably with some intent.
We're Americans, aren't we? We're the good guys. Our traditional role is to rein in the bad guys, like Iran, isn't it?
Fresh from such a stunning upset, Rowhani will need quickly to show Iranians some results, in particular on the economic front. Rowhani now needs to persuade supreme leader Khamenei to give him the running room to try a new approach.
Choosing one's words carefully is important simply because the stakes are high and emotions are powerful. Some who criticize Israel and its policies are undoubtedly anti-Semitic, but any intellectually honest person knows that not all of them are.
