As Tunisian President-for-Life Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled into ignominious exile two weeks ago, democrats around the world found hope in the notion that Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution would spread to Iran. The images of demonstrations from Sidi Bouzid to Tunis reminded Americans of the massive 2009 protests that gave rise to Iran's opposition Green Movement, and as pro-democracy movements inspired by Tunisia emerged in Egypt and Yemen, many observers saw a chance for Iran to be next. But looking closer, it's clear that Iranians -- from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on down to the Green Movement opposition -- view the Tunisia situation as vastly different from their own, and not one that's likely to spill over into a renewed push for democratic reform in their own country.

Despite the examples of Ben Ali and Egypt's beleaguered President Hosni Mubarak, Iran's leaders are far from running scared. In fact, Tehran is taking a distinctly more triumphalist understanding of the roots and effects of the Tunisian protests than American commentators would expect from another authoritarian Middle Eastern government -- particularly from one facing its own challenges from opposition forces.

Read more.

The center of gravity in the Middle East has shifted dramatically in the past few decades from the Arab heartland comprising Egypt and the Fertile Crescent to what was once considered the non-Arab periphery -- Turkey and Iran. The exciting era of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, especially Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal and the all too brief union of Egypt with Syria, had made the Arab heartland the symbol par excellence of the reassertion of the Third World's dignity and its aspirations for autonomy from the great powers. Since the 1970s, that air of excitement and hope has given way to the moribund nature of Arab politics and the perpetuation of autocratic and kleptocratic rule, which have contributed in large measure to the diminution in the regional role of major Arab states such as Egypt. Regimes that were once considered "liberalizing autocracies", such as Egypt with its controlled elections and Jordan with an increasingly vocal parliamentary opposition, have now reverted to an unalloyed autocratic model.

Read on

This week, Iran implemented an overhaul of its national subsidy system, in effect cutting billions of dollars worth of subsidies for daily consumer use, especially fuel and electricity. Though cushioned by transfer payments to low-income households, it is akin to a major austerity move. While the economic impact is clear, many outsiders remain baffled how a regime ridden with internal factionalism (and widespread unpopularity) can manage such radical reforms. The past few weeks have seen rumors of a looming impeachment trial of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, followed by his humiliating dismissal of Foreign Minister Mottaki. These are hardly the signs of calm leadership steering through an economic crisis.

But narratives grabbed from the headlines can be misleading, and longer-term developments in Tehran point in a surprising direction. Today, the Islamic Republic is set to become more politically stable, and may even offer the chance for improved US-Iranian relations under what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called an emerging "military dictatorship."

Read on

When outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair was named envoy to the Middle East in 2007 -- representing the "quartet" of the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations -- he knew what it meant: "huge intensity and work." Now three years later, after the break down of the most recent peace talks, the conflict seems as intractable as ever. In conversation with Foreign Policy's Elizabeth Dickinson, Blair discussed the most knotty problems in the region, from settlements to Iran to the movement to unilaterally recognize the state of Palestine.

Foreign Policy: I understand that you met with some Palestinian leaders yesterday evening; what are your thoughts on the direction the peace process has gone, particularly on the Obama administration's push on the settlements?

Tony Blair: We've hit an impasse here. The challenge is to get an effective negotiation going, [one] that is credible. And the question is how do you give credibility to that negotiation -- and the settlement freeze was one way of doing that. We can't proceed on that basis now, but we can look for other ways of giving credibility to the negotiation. The important thing is to get a negotiation underway, in a context in which both sides have the confidence that this is a real negotiation, with both parties actually wanting to narrow the differences and reach a deal. Obviously, it's a setback for the process, but it's not a setback that should mean that we give up on it -- on the contrary, we've got to redouble our efforts and find a way forward.

Read more.

Frustrated by the absence of substantive progress during the latest round of P5+1 talks in Geneva, some Iran analysts would have U.S. policy plunge once again into the murky territory of regime change. Some hope that a military attack might bring about this goal. Others, taking what seems to be the high road, argue that the U.S. should back a people's democratic revolution. This second idea is deeply alluring. After all, it accords with our most cherished ideas while also offering a solution that serves U.S. national interests. What advocate of democracy would not want Iran's Green Movement to prevail? In one fell swoop, its victory would bring to the table legitimate Iranian leaders who keenly defend Iran's right to peaceful nuclear power, but who would also provide a far more constructive negotiating partner for the U.S. and its allies. 

The problem, however, is that democratic reform in Iran is a long-term proposition. As a result, it cannot serve as the basis for an effective U.S.-Iran policy. If the Obama White House were to rest its efforts to dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons on regime change, it would end up with an Iran policy as incoherent as those of the administrations that preceded it.

Read on

The Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. hosted a fundraiser at his residence for a neoconservative D.C. think-tank, which solicited donations of $5,000 for invitations to the event. But the think-tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), didn't bother to tell the Pakistani embassy that the event was a fundraiser or that it was sandwiched in the middle of a two-and-a-half day conference on "Countering the Iranian Threat" put on by the group.

"We didn't know at all that they have done this fundraising," Imran Gardezi, a spokesperson for the Pakistani embassy, told the Middle East Channel. "And neither did they share with us that they would be doing this conference. Very frankly, we didn't know about this conference."

Though the dinner appeared in the paper and online conference programs, FDD president Cliff May insisted that the two were unrelated: "The dinner was separate from the conference but it coincided with the conference. Why? Because many friends of FDD were in town for the conference," he wrote in an e-mail to the Middle East Channel. May conceded that his staff may have failed to notify the Pakistani embassy that the group was in the middle of hosting the conference.

Read on

Casual Iran observers tend to portray the country's most prominent political division as that between fundamentalist hard-liners and secular moderates. In reality, however, the struggle for Iran's future is a three-way fight waged by the different branches of conservatives that control the parliament, the presidency, and the theocracy. The Green Movement may have stalled, but the parliamentary opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has only grown stronger and more assertive over the past year -- culminating in a recent push to charge the president with abuses of power warranting impeachment. Those efforts are coming to a halt under orders from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who fears that the parliament's attempt to assert itself against the president will also be at the expense of his own power base, the country's conservative mullahs.

In fact, this isn't the first round of infighting among Iran's leaders. In July 2009, legislators warned Ahmadinejad that they would seek to oust him as the chief executive if he continued acting in an autocratic manner. Ahmadinejad responded by claiming the executive branch is the most important one of the government.

Read more.

In the coming weeks, the United States may well be joining a new round of nuclear negotiations with Iran. But, rather than working to promote their success, most commentators seem to be consumed with explaining their anticipated failure. And their follow-up policy prescriptions seem designed to do more harm than good. Take Karim Sadjadpour's article, "The Sources of Soviet Iranian Conduct," in the November issue of Foreign Policy. Sadjadpour seeks to adapt George Kennan's famous 1947 "Mr. X" article -- which proposed the outlines of the Cold War "containment" strategy used against the Soviet Union -- for America's current Iran debate.

"Like the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic is a corrupt, inefficient, authoritarian regime whose bankrupt ideology resonates far more abroad than it does at home," Sadjadpour writes. "Also like the men who once ruled Moscow, Iran's current leaders have a victimization complex and, as they themselves admit, derive their internal legitimacy from thumbing their noses at Uncle Sam." It's a clever conceit, but it would be a disaster for U.S. interests if Sadjadpour's piece attains anything close to the level of influence achieved by Kennan's.

Read more.

With Republicans now sharing the burden of governing in the next Congress, President Barack Obama has an opportunity to define the terms of the Iran debate instead of spending two more years capitulating to a Democratic Congress worried about appearing weak or out of sync with hardliners on the Iran issue.

For a president who ran on the promise of fighting the "smallness" of Washington's political discourse that is unequipped for the immensity of the challenges America faces, few issues suffer more from that "smallness" than the Iran debate. In Washington, when in doubt, Iran saber rattling always seems to pay -- and the implications for our Iran policy could not be more disastrous. Obama had offered the promise of fighting this paradigm and supporting a new strategy of engagement, which is the only effective means to resolve the nuclear issue, address the human rights situation, and create space for pro-democracy activists in Iran.

Unfortunately, instead of fighting the Bush paradigm that rewards policymakers on the basis of bellicosity towards Iran, Obama has by and large perpetuated a political metric that defines success on Iran only in terms of pressure. Only if Obama raises the consequences of the dire alternative to a successful engagement strategy -- war with Iran -- and stakes out a new path to create his own political space for diplomacy, can the president effectively navigate the new reality in Congress and pursue a successful Iran agenda.

Read on

In the year since the [2006 Israel-Hezbollah] war, the Mahdi Scouts had nearly doubled its national enrollment to 60,000. They had run out of capacity to admit more, [the chief of Hezbollah's scouts] Bilal Naim said, but they were expanding as fast as they could. Hezbollah policed its community tightly, but not without concern for its mental well-being. Constant warfare (or mobilization for such) took its toll, especially on children and on the families of martyrs.

One goal of the scouts was to comfort the afflicted. The scouts tried to maintain a state of normalcy -- at least as Hezbollah defined it -- for its most vulnerable members. If left to their own devices, Bilal Naim said, the children of martyrs would isolate themselves and develop emotional problems. "We try to raise the children in the community and find new husbands for the widows," he said. "Otherwise the children become complicated, and develop unhealthy behaviors like aggression."

Read more.

For three decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has bedeviled the United States, resisting both incentives and disincentives and working all the while to foil American designs in the Middle East. If 20th-century Russia was to Winston Churchill a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, for observers of contemporary Iran, the Islamic Republic often resembles a villain inside a victim behind a veil.

Seeking to understand their mysterious foe, American analysts most commonly invoke three historical analogies to explain its character and future trajectory: Red China, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. The chosen metaphor pretty much dictates the proposed response, and most prescriptions for U.S. policy have come down to one of these variations: attempt to coax the Iranian regime into modernity; forget the diplomatic niceties and "pre-emptively" attack it to prevent or delay its acquisition of nuclear weapons; or contain it in hopes it will change or collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions.

Read more.

Is India an adversary or ally of the West in opposing Iran's nuclear ambitions? As one of the countries that has consistently voted against Iran at the IAEA--yet has been loathe to abandon business with the country--India has been viewed with both confusion and consternation in the West. Recent commentary in the international media suggests that India is reluctantly adhering to the sanctions regime against Iran because it needs the attention of the West to fulfill its major power ambitions, and that given a chance, India would trade with Iran without hesitation in a bid to protect its energy interests and to get its support on Afghanistan. These statements are often used synonymously with India's engagement with other pariah states like Myanmar and Sudan. But such commentary oversimplifies India's Iran policy, which cannot be defined in the binary "Are you with us or against us?" terms that have characterized debates on Iran in the West.

Read on

The Obama administration has recently been seeking to draw attention to the impact of its new sanctions regime on Iran. Earlier this week, for instance, Treasury undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey told a large audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that "even at this early stage, as pressure is mounting, the strategy is beginning to give us the leverage we seek. It is already working." There are some signs to back this up. Iranian officials have begun to publicly acknowledge that UN/U.S./EU sanctions are taking an increasing toll on the country. Iranian envoys are touring around the world to identify and encourage small banks and entities that do not do business with the U.S. to take advantage of this opportunity and work with Iran.

But while the U.S. hopes that sanctions can affect Iran's calculation with regard to the nuclear program, it is actually pushing Tehran into a highly familiar area. Since its inception, the Islamic Republic has grown in an environment of conflict, isolation and sanctions. The hostage crisis and later the Iran-Iraq war allowed the Islamic government to marginalize its powerful rivals and solidify its base in a relatively isolated and hostile international environment. Sanctions and isolation are not uncharted territory for Iran. These ongoing pressures might bite, but they can also empower the IRGC and other institutions that are able to do an end run around the sanctions and get the country what it needs from the black market. A closer look at how Iranians have been arguing about the sanctions suggests that American hopes for the sanctions may be misplaced.

Read on

It is no secret that Arab public opinion toward U.S. President Barack Obama has soured since his June 2009 speech in Cairo, Egypt. According to a slew of recent opinion polls, Arabs have been deeply disappointed with Obama's accommodations to Israel. Analysts have suggested that this discontent has caused Arabs to embrace Iran and its nuclear program, and are hostile to U.S.-led attempts to isolate and pressure the Islamic Republic. But on this front, the numbers tell a very different story.

Prof. Shibley Telhami, for example, contended that Arab opinion is "shifting toward a positive perception of Iran's nuclear program." Telhami, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a prominent analyst of Middle Eastern public opinion, asserts that Arab publics even have sanguine views about the consequences for the region if Iran was to develop a nuclear weapon. 

Read more.