Israel is getting really nervous that they just might not have enough time to bomb Iran, which would just be terrible. They claim that the new international sanctions have closed the window for them to act. I wonder if this has anything to do with it: the fact that the latest intelligence estimates, both in [...]

Earlier this week, Hillary Clinton made the case that the President calling for Bashar al-Assad to step down from power in Syria would be ineffectual: “It’s not going to be any news if the United States says, ‘Assad needs to go.’ Okay, fine, what’s next?” asked Clinton, who spoke before a room packed with service [...]

The big news in Syria is that President Obama plans to specifically call for Bashar al-Assad to step down. This was supposed to be paired with new sanctions on Syria. Well, today we got the sanctions, but we didn’t get the call to step down. The sanctions are targeted at the nation’s largest bank and [...]

It appears that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is setting up the endgame in Syria to demolish the uprising among his subjects. He’s moved tanks into a fourth city, the Damascus suburb of Muadhamiya. This follows military interventions in Homs, Banias and Deraa. They cut off phone and electricity lines in Muadhamiya, just like they did [...]

The closest thing to movement in the stalemated civil war in Libya is a story like this about shortages in Tripoli. The new hopes of success are pinned on waiting Gadhafi out, tightening the supply lines and hoping he either runs out of bullets or that his people rise up against him. But sanctions are [...]

In reaction to the tanks now overrunning Deraa in Syria, the White House has begun to talk about “targeted sanctions” against the Assad regime. The White House, deploring “brutal violence used by the government of Syria against its people,” said President Barack Obama’s administration was considering targeted sanctions to make clear that “this behavior is [...]

Talks aimed at a resolution between Iran and the West over their nuclear program collapsed today, with no progress and no timetable for future talks. Overall the negotiations sounded like a huge waste of time. Western officials expressed disappointment, but not surprise. They reiterated that their proposals, including a modified deal under which Iran would [...]

In the past week, we saw Jeffrey Goldberg start what appeared to be a coordinated PR campaign on behalf of Israel to prepare the ground for a potential military strike on Iran’s nuclear processing facilities. Now, according to a New York Times report, the Obama Administration is working to pre-empt that, by stressing how far [...]

Reform leaders in Iran abruptly called off a protest set for the one-year anniversary of what they consider stolen elections that brought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a second term, indicative of the struggles of a reform movement which has been successfully repressed by the ruling Islamic leadership. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi told their followers [...]

Barack Obama, in an appearance with French President Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday, said he expected sanctions on Iran passed by the UN within weeks. But Obama admitted that key world powers had “not yet” closed wide gaps on the specifics of the biting new measures, as he and Sarkozy made an apparently coordinated effort to up [...]

Yesterday the United States released a draft proposal for sanctions against the Iranian government. This would be the fourth round of sanctions since 2006, none of which have resolved any dispute between Iran and the West over their nuclear program, which they say is solely for the purposes of energy generation. The diplomats said the [...]