The Olympics are always a source of good metaphors, at least while they’re being broadcast, and people are familiar for two weeks with sports they never see anywhere else. I thought the poorly-designed luge track, scene of a fatal accident and a number of other training mishaps, was a fine choice for talking about Iran’s [...]

Boy, the list things Iran’s wacky president Ahmadinejad doesn’t believe in keeps growing. Caught red-handed this time, the Iranian hard-liner, of course, still pretends that Iran has no nuclear ambitions, and that the nuclear ambitions it that doesn’t have are for peaceful purposes only. It needs those 30,000 centrifuges in a secret tunnel, which suddenly [...]

The genie, as they say, is out of the bottle. The hard-line leadership of Iran is trying to do two opposite things at the same time–promote a partially open society and try to control it. Having given the people of Iran, who increasingly chafe under the limits of a rigid authoritarian society, at least the [...]

It remains to be seen if the current unrest in Iran leads to genuine reform, or if it will end in a bloody repression. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, apparently badly misjudged the mood of the people, and he’s clearly having trouble putting the genie back in the bottle. The Iranian population, young and [...]