Iran

In the State of the Union address of 1954, which Dwight Eisenhower delivered less than a year after he had secretly ordered the C.I.A. to overthrow Tehran’s left-leaning government, he celebrated “the forces of stability and freedom” at work in Iran. In 1980, Jimmy Carter delivered his annual address amid the whirlwind of Iran’s Islamic and anti-American revolution, which was inflamed in part by Iranians’ memories of Eisenhower’s coup. “We will face these challenges,” Carter declared.

While winter is in full swing in Tehran with snow blanketing the capital, senior officials of the Islamic Republic can be forgiven for feeling hot. Over the past three weeks, the major powers have dramatically turned up the pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme. We have now entered the oil-squeeze phase.

Chest-thumping threats by senior Iranian officials in recent days to close down the Strait of Hormuz sound like the proverbial cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. Iran's economy is overwhelmingly dependent on oil sales, most of which moves through the Strait to markets in Asia and Europe. A shut-down of the Strait would largely close the taps on Iran's own oil sales.

Newt Gingrich thinks that because CNN’s John King asked about his personal life last week, the “elite, liberal media” is out to get Republican presidential candidates. Nonsense. If journalists really wanted to make Gingrich and his fellow GOP frontrunners squirm, they’d ask why they supported the war in Iraq.

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The “Iran problem” can be summed up as follows: The Iranians really seem to be building nuclear weapons and, while they’re not there yet (an important caveat), they have everything they need to get there soon. It would be seriously bad news if they took that final step. Yet a pre-emptive strike on their nuclear facilities would set back their program only slightly, boost popular support for their regime, and likely unleash a spree of terrorist attacks and economic retaliation with devastating effects worldwide.

Every time I get depressed about politics in Israel, I try to remember one salient fact: their political system still sometimes functions better than ours.

The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not much of a student of American history. It might be useful, however, if he heeds the words of the late American Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who once said: "Propaganda, to be effective, must be believed. To be believed, it must be credible. To be credible, it must be true."

Calls by Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary Hillary Clinton to "unite the world in the isolation of and dealing with the Iranians," in response to an alleged Iranian plot to kill Saudi Arabia's Ambassador in Washington, reflect a hubristic misapprehension of reality.

The Obama Administration mistakenly believes it can exploit the accusations for strategic advantage. In fact, they are likely to play to Iran's advantage, not America's.

Ask an average Iranian what they think of Britain and the British and the responses will vary from cunning to cutthroat to clever. As a journalist based in Iran several years ago, I would often hear middle class Iranians rail against the British in one breath, and in the next breath, describe them as strategic masters controlling the world and goading, Rasputin-like, their overmuscled, impressionable “American friend” into wars and quagmires.