Middle-east Arab News Opinion | Asharq Al-awsat

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A woman walks past a painting of Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran December 11, 2015. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi/TIMA

Trump and 5 Conditions for Regime Change in Iran

by Amir Taheri | Jun 20, 2017 | Features

Talk to anyone in or close to the Trump administration in Washington and you will hear two things about Iran. The first is that the Islamic Republic remains on top of the list of the United States’ “concerns” about foreign policy. The second is that...

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Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. (Reuters)

Iran: The Mullahs’ Discomfort With Persian Language

by Amir Taheri | Jun 16, 2017 | Opinion

Like in most Indo-European languages, sentence arrangement in the Persian language is based on subject, object, verb or SOV in linguistic code. (In Arabic it is the other way round!) This means that the first thing that a Persian sentence does is to identify the...

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Jim Mattis at his confirmation hearing. (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

Questions that General Mattis Can’t Answer

by Amir Taheri | Jun 9, 2017 | Opinion

In one of his first acts as President of the United States, Donald Trump lifted the restrictions imposed by his predecessor Barack Obama on the Pentagon’s ability to devise and implement strategies in Iraq and Syria as part of a re-invigorated war on terrorism. The...

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The Qatar Airways office is seen in Doha, Qatar June 5, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer

Qatar…What Next ?

by Amir Taheri | Jun 8, 2017 | Features

What next? This is the question that policymakers and analysts in major capitals have been posing for the past three days as they pondered the severance of diplomatic ties between Arab states and Qatar. Though no one knows what the future may contain, three points are...

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President Vladimir Putin at a news conference at the Kremlin in Moscow. (Reuters)

Putin between the Tsar and The Commissar

by Amir Taheri | Jun 2, 2017 | Opinion

After decades at the top of Russian politics, Vladimir Putin should not be an unknown quantity, at least as far as Western specialists are concerned. One question they ought to consider is how hard and how far Putin should be pushed to remain within the limits of...