Dare We Say It? The Mullahs Must Go
Sanctions and diplomacy have thus far failed to induce the Iranian regime to cease its nuclear weapons program. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. Top Iranian leaders, from Supreme Leader A...
Mir-Hossein Mousavi
Examining Nuclear Negotiations: Iran After Rouhani’s First 100 Days
Chairman Royce, Ranking Member Engel, Members of the Committee, on behalf of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, thank you for inviting me to testify today on this important topic....
Congressional Testimonies
Rouhani’s New Spymaster After 100 Days
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has famously promised “moderation” in Iran since being elected president of the Islamic Republic this summer. His intelligence minister, Mahmoud Alavi...
Policy Briefs
Engagement Is Back
President Obama’s policy of engagement with Iran is back on track–this is the core message of the president’s speech earlier today at the United Nations General Assembly....
Op-eds
It’s War, You Idiots
It’s hard to get our minds around the dimensions of the slaughter underway in the Middle East and Africa, and harder still to see that the battlefields of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, S...
Op-eds
Iran’s New President a Reformist? Hardly.
Co-authored by Saeed Ghasseminejad Say what you wish about Iran’s newly elected president’s supposedly moderate credentials. There is little doubt that Hassan R...
Op-eds
Iranian Election Reflections (Part 2)
Editor's note: This post is the second in a three-part series on Iran's recent presidential election....
Op-eds
Meet the New Mullah
Iranians aren’t wrong to celebrate the presidential victory of Hassan Rouhani. It is a (small) thumb in the eye of the country’s clerical ruler, Ali Khamenei. Leaving aside foreign af...
Op-eds
Why You Shouldn’t Get Too Excited About Rouhani
Good riddance: The end of the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad era should be welcomed by all who want to see a free and democratic Iran and a peaceful resolution to the ongoing nuclear crisis with Tehran. But...
Op-eds
Iran’s Meaningless Presidential Elections
The Islamic Republic of Iran is holding its eleventh presidential election on Friday. It’s all very exciting — just as it was in 1979 when, right after the Iranian Revolution that bro...
Op-eds
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: Guardians of the Revolution and Violators of Human Rights
Honorable members of this subcommittee, I am privileged to appear before you today to discuss the role of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in a vast system of domestic repres...
Congressional Testimonies
A Third Way to Address the Iranian Threat
Support the opposition and let Iranians topple a regime they despise.
Op-eds
Princeton’s Iranian Agent of Influence
The cautionary tale of Seyed Hossein Mousavian
Op-eds
The Most Dangerous Man in the World
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ali Khamenei
Op-eds
Tehran Takedown
How to Spark an Iranian Revolution
Op-eds
Iranian Carnival (aka “Elections”) Redux
The Basij — the radical thugs who beat up Iranians for violations of the dress code and other sins against the official version of Islam — will be voting early and often in Iran on Fr...
Op-eds
Obama Administration Ignored Iranian Opposition’s Advice
When mass demonstrations against the Iranian regime erupted in the summer of 2009, the Obama administration found itself facing a totally unexpected problem. President Obama had gone to great len...
Op-eds
Iran in Convulsion (the Death Spiral Continues)
Big news today from Iran, confirming once again that the hapless regime in Tehran proceeds down its death spiral. The first is the spectacular collapse of the national currency, which has lost 35...
Op-eds
Iran and the Myth of the Pro-Regime Backlash
A U.S. military strike is just as likely to accelerate internal regime change as it is to hinder it.
Op-eds
The War Against the Mullahs
This past weekend’s monster explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base outside Tehran has attracted the usual assortment of speculation and “informed information,” most of it suck...