Free Republic

Tokyo's governor, Shintaro Ishihara, has tempered his political ambitions. (By Tsugufumi Matsumoto -- Associated Press) Tokyo Maverick Just One of the Crowd NowFiery Nationalist Governor Sees His Once-Provocative Views Go Mainstream By Anthony Faiola Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, November 13, 2005; Page A20 TOKYO -- Shintaro Ishihara, governor of one of the world's most populous cities, sat comfortably in a white leather armchair in his private meeting room, the endless steel and neon of Greater Tokyo visible behind him through wall-length windows. Despite the grandeur of his surroundings, Ishihara, 73, no longer seems the threat he once was,...

Saturday October 22, 5:34 PM Hill likely to give up visiting N. Korea, faces U.S. hard-liners (Kyodo) _ Christopher Hill, the top U.S. negotiator for the six-party nuclear talks, is likely to give up his plan to visit North Korea before the six meet for the fifth round in early November, U.S. and other six-party sources said Saturday. The sources attributed it to the tough conditions set by hard-liners in the U.S. administration who are insisting on the need for the visit to produce such concrete results as Pyongyang halting operations at its Yongbyon nuclear complex. A U.S. congressional source...

Analysis not final, officials say WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A CIA report has determined with "relative certainty" that Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was not involved in the taking of U.S. hostages 26 years ago, three government officials told CNN on Friday. The officials insisted on anonymity, saying they did not want to speak for the CIA about its report. Another U.S. official said the tone of the report is that there is no evidence to date that the new Iranian president was among those who held U.S. diplomats hostage. The officials cautioned that the analysis is not final. Two former...

The Bush administration has justified its softly-softly approach to the Iranian nuclear program on grounds it has firm commitments from the Europeans to get tough should diplomacy fail. Those promises are about to be put to the test now that Iran has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency of its intention to resume uranium enrichment. The suspension agreement was inked last November after what turns out to have been nearly 20 years of Iranian deception vis-à-vis the IAEA. And it can be argued that diplomacy has at least bought time, assuming--and it's a big assumption given how many times Iran...

With bone-cracking brutality, the waves of baton-wielding police seemed to confirm what the already demoralised Iranian reform movement had been dreading: the dawn of a new era of political repression. Several hundred pro-reformists had gathered outside Tehran University to demand the release of a jailed dissident journalist, Akbar Ganji, who is in the fifth week of a hunger strike, when they were confronted by massed ranks of officers. In the melee, large numbers of demonstrators, including several women, were hurt. Among the injured were a former reformist MP, Mousavi Khoeini, who had a broken rib after being hit with an...

TEHRAN, July 22 (MNA) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is due to visit Tehran and take part in President-Elect Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s inauguration ceremony, the FARS News Agency reported on Friday. Chavez, who visited Iran three times during President Khatami’s tenure, will travel to Tehran on 30 July, for the fourth time. The presence of Chavez in Tehran can strengthen friendly ties between Iran and Venezuela, which have developed closer relations over the past several years. Ahmadinejad will be sworn as Iran’s next president on August 4.

The landslide victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in second round of the presidential election leaves conservative factions of the clerical establishment and the military in firm control of most of Iran’s levers of political power. This is the culmination of a process that started with the 2003 municipal elections, and therefore does not constitute a sudden lurch towards a more austere social policy and away from political and economic engagement with the West. However, the defeat of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been a decisive setback for those who had hoped that the election might mark a turnaround in the fortunes of...

THE ultra-conservative Mayor of Tehran coasted to a shock victory in Iran’s presidential elections last night, a development that threatens to stifle the social reforms initiated by his predecessor and set his country on a new collision course with the West.With more than 80 per cent of the votes counted, election officials said that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 49, held a commanding lead of 61 per cent over his reformist rival, Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 70. The Interior Ministry declared Mr Ahmadinejad the winner. “Poor provinces have voted massively for Ahmadinejad,” an unnamed ministry official said. With five candidates knocked out...

Iran Moderate Says Hard-Liners Rigged Election By MICHAEL SLACKMAN Published: June 19, 2005 TEHRAN, June 18 - The race for the presidency in Iran was thrown into turmoil on Saturday when the third-place finisher accused conservative hard-liners of rigging the election and cutting him out of the runoff vote next week, which will be between a former president and the conservative mayor of Tehran. The accusation of voting irregularities came from Mehdi Karroubi, a cleric and former speaker of Parliament known as a conciliator, who said he would continue to press his case publicly unless the country's supreme religious leader...

<p>Harvard historian Richard Pipes shaped the Reagan administration's aggressive approach to the Soviet Union. His support for confrontation over containment prefigured the Bush foreign policy of today.</p> <p>OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, the Bush administration has inspired one of the more stimulating scavenger hunts in recent memory -- the search for the Ur-theorist of its bold foreign policy initiatives. With each new turn another name has emerged. "Regime change" gave us the political philosopher Leo Strauss. The "shock and awe" campaign brought forth the Cold War calculations of military strategist Albert Wohlstetter. Hints of follow-up aggression against Syria and North Korea had some consulting Trotsky's writings on "permanent revolution."</p>