Epstein Secrets

hani was his country's nuclear negotiator, Iran offered concessions to the West to limit its program. At that time, Iran had about 164 centrifuges. The United States and Israel refused that deal and decided to squeeze harder. Today, Iran has 19,000 centrifuges. Now, U.S. officials fear a similar process will rep

Although Iran is often caricatured as a nation of irrational, would-be martyrs, its behavior has been ruthlessly rational for the most part. Even Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini -- a far more committed ideologue than his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- agreed to end the Iran-h War in 1988 when his subordinates told hi

ivil war," was also designed as another milksop to Russia. The speech used precisely the language that the Kremlin uses whenever it wants to accuse the United States of acting like a superpower: "This is not a zero-sum endeavor," Obama said of the current geopolitical landscape. "We are no longer in a Cold War.

, and Bahrain. Although Iranian-Saudi enmity dates back many decades, it became acute after the 1979 Islamic Revolution when Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, began to spread his revolutionary brand of Shia Islam across the region. The impact was not immediately evident. Iran's war with Iraq in the 1980

permanent legacy of the Arab Spring. This question isn't trivial, as the political fortunes of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, and the interests of the United States, hang in the balance. A window onto the question of whether it will be political Islam or secular nationalism that will emerge strengthened from th

ood. And in Iran in 1979, individuals who were ardent secular nationalists donned Islamic garb and supported the Islamic Revolution and its leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. For them, Islam became a more potent outlet for nationalist ambitions than the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who had lost political legitimacy. Th

y traumatic, it was a cheap investment that cost America dearly in lives and treasure. It also transformed the national security infrastructure of the United States more profoundly than any event since the start of the Cold War. Whole new bureaucracies have been created, including the Department of Homeland Sec

ran's opposition leaders are limited in their ambitions: they remain committed to the Islamic Revolution and the principles of its leader, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but they want to reform the establishment within that framework. "The Green opposition is not questioning the foundation of the system as happene