A few months back when John McCain went to the Middle East to participate in photo-ops, spend quality time with his favorite hawk, Senator Lieberman, and pretend that his policy prescription to stay in Iraq for a hundred years was rooted in "conditions on the ground," he made a major...

On the night that Barack Obama captured enough delegates to become the Democratic nominee, a lot of commentators and supporters of both him and Hillary Clinton could not help but acknowledge the significance of his candidacy. It was the first time in this country's history when a major party had...

Something extraordinary happened last week. The State Department had originally granted seven Palestinian students in the Gaza Strip Fulbright scholarships to come to the United States for higher education. But last week, the students received e-mails from the State Department, saying that the grants were being "redirected" to other...

Mr. Amitai Etzioni has a piece on The Huffington Post, in which he tries to weaken the main argument used to make the case against military attack on Iran. In the article, he states that "many states -- Iran, among others -- have leaders who are very capable of...

Watching American (and Iranian-Americans who haven't been to Iran since the revolution of 1979) "experts" talk about Iran can be a painful experience. Most of the analyses are not only superficial and stereotypical, they also lack the depth that is required in order to make sound policy.

Of course the...

After the mainstream media's weeks of obsession with Rev. Wright, some of which continued even after Senator Obama denounced him in no unequivocal terms, many bloggers and activists seem to have succeeded in getting the media to again do what it is supposed to do: cover the issues that matter...

Maybe the media is too busy slicing and dicing the comments of Rev. Jeremiah Wright to pay attention to the muscle-headed comments of Hillary Clinton a few days ago. On Good Morning America on Tuesday, in a response to a question about a hypothetical attack by Iran on Israel, Hillary...

On Wednesday, the Gallop Poll reported on a new survey's findings that the battle between Senators Clinton and Obama is leading many democrats to say they would vote for McCain if their favorite candidate isn't nominated. 19% of Obama supporters asked by the survey expressed this intention and that...

The Sun is 400 times larger than the moon. But when the moon aligns itself between us and the sun, it almost blocks all of sun's light and appears as if the two celestial bodies are of the same size. But of course, it appears this way because the...

I'm trying hard to save my relationship with the American democracy these days by trying to remember why we fell in love in the first place. Democratic elections mean a lot to me personally. I spent the first 16 years of my life in Iran, a country that's run by...

The power of technology has been the biggest enemy of authoritarian regimes. Iranians' only means of contact with the outside world throughout the sixteen years that I lived there used to be the state-run TV news and BBC Persian radio, which has a notoriously poor quality because of the Iranian...

During the debate in Ohio last Tuesday, Tim Russert asked Senator Obama whether he would "reject" the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, because of some of the anti-Semitic comments Farrakhan had previous made, including his calling Judaism "gutter religion." In response, Senator Obama made...

In the mid 1990s and around the time when the former and more moderate Iranian president Khatami was elected to office, the reform movement began to gain real momentum. In the new millennium and in light of incredible advancements in technology from global satellite TVs to internet and blogs, the...

Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton participated in a substantive debate in Texas last night. They answered a range of questions from policy to politics, and both candidates did a fine job of answering the questions to the best of their abilities. One of the most contentious issues throughout this...

During a campaign stop last month, someone in the audience rose to ask John McCain about Iraq. The questioner began to share some background facts before posing the question, saying "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years." Before he got the chance to ask the...

Yesterday, John Edwards dropped out of the presidential race. Throughout his campaign, he brought some of the most important issues to the center stage. As the populist candidate, he made a valuable contribution by regularly addressing the huge disparities that exist between the rich as the poor; After all, the...

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has been in a supposed struggle against what it calls "terrorism." The administration sought to counter the 9/11 attacks by initially invading Afghanistan, which was run by the Taliban and harbored Al Qaeda. Bush then expanded the strategy by identifying three countries --...

The Washington campaign book of the Clintons tells them to criticize other candidates in areas where Hillary is either the weakest candidate or has had by far the worst record.

It started with the very premise of her campaign, claiming she was the candidate with the most "experience." Of...

Hillary Clinton was wrong on Iraq when she voted to give George Bush the authority to use force in 2003. So with war having turned out to be the biggest foreign policy disaster since World War II, one would think that the smartest thing she can do is to try...

The most common conclusion from last night's NH primary was that a poll can be wrong even when it is an average of 10 other polls, all with small margins of error. But I drew a second conclusion from last night's primary, which was that if Edwards wants change in...