More in ‘Iran’

With four players scoring double-digits (and with the Minnesota Timberwolves’s Kevin Love stepping up for 13 points and 6 rebounds in only 11 minutes), the United States national basketball team crushed Iran’s 88-51 in the preliminary round of the 2010 FIBA World Championships, in Turkey. 33 of Iran’s 51 points were scored by just two ...

• After Hamas claimed responsibility for killing four Israelis (and promised further attacks), the Palestinian Authority proceeded on one of its largest-ever arrestings. [Haaretz]
• Thomas Friedman predicts that extremist efforts to thwart peace, from Rabbi Yosef’s comments about Palestinians to yesterday’s attack, are only going to get worse. [NYT]
• U.S. envoy George Mitchell spoke cryptically ...

Saudi Arabia lacks Israel’s official stance of nuclear ambiguity, but its status is even more opaque. Indeed, though it has never acknowledged a nuclear program, the kingdom may already have a bomb.
With Iran’s seemingly inexorable march toward a nuclear weapon, it’s not difficult to see why the Saudis would want one of their own, to ...

Faced with peace-process pessimism, the proper response is: Well, okay, if talking isn’t likely to accomplish anything, what is? To which (if you ask me, anyway), the response is: Creating a regional context in which both Israel and the moderate Palestinian West Bank leadership feel safer about making real concessions. The chief way to do ...

• President Abbas threatened to end the announced direct peace talks if the West Bank construction freeze is lifted, as it is currently scheduled to be in late September. [AP/LAT]
• Iran unveiled a new long-range unmanned bomber drone, which President Ahmadinejad called a potential “ambassador of death.” [NYT]
• Iran’s Russia-built Bushehr nuclear reactor will be ...

In Newsweek, Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith argued that the United States is perfectly happy to sell sophisticated military equipment, like F-15 fighter planes, to Saudi Arabia—and Israel is perfectly happy to see the sale go through, provided the planes lack longer-range capability—because the name of the game in the region is increasingly the ...

From the beginning of the nuclear era we have focused on states and national leaders who decide whether to seek nuclear weapons. What is new and central to recent efforts to join the nuclear weapons club are the role of supplying companies, some witting, others acting with studious inadvertence, and still others duped by the ...

• Not that we haven’t heard this before, but President Abbas is expected to agree to direct talks, and direct talks to resume, sometime this week. [LAT]
• George Will again emphasizes that Prime Minister Netanyahu sees a nuclear Iran as simply unacceptable, period. [WP]
• President Obama reportedly warned Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that ...

In the lull of August, major media outlets are turning a watchful eye on Iran. Jeffrey Goldberg’s

Today, Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith explored the future of U.S. military aid to Lebanon, in light of last week’s border skirmish—provoked by the Lebanese Armed Forces—and now two prominent congresspersons’ blocking of a planned $100 million. Lebanon’s first response to this block was to call it “unwarranted,” but pretty soon—and particularly after Iran ...