The New Republic

State Department European affairs chief Phil Gordon to visit Belarus, meet with "Europe's last dictator." --Michael Crowley READ MORE >>

One interesting wrinkle in the story of Baitullah Mehsud's assassination-by-drone is that Mehsud has long been a higher-priority target for Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, than he has been for the United States. This may have been for personal reasons. READ MORE >>

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The phrase, "a government in Tel Aviv," does not come from an article written in 1948 during which the provisional government of Israel had, in fact, headquartered itself in the city then only 40 years old. Not at all. READ MORE >>

The New York Times' lede story today, which summarizes the paper's poll on health care and other issues, has taken flak from Mickey Kaus (second item). Here is the Times: Over all, the poll portrays a nation torn by conflicting impulses and confusion. READ MORE >>

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Today, President Obama met with Thomas S. Monson (above), the president of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). READ MORE >>

Richard A Clarke came from inside--high-inside--American intelligence. And he was against the Iraq war. It was enough to make him a liberal hero. But in his testimony to (and around) the 9/11 commission he was also critical, devastatingly so, about how the White House under both President Clinton and President Bush had been so pre-occupied with other matters that they'd left the war against terrorism which we needed direly more or less neglected. We know that Clinton barely functioned as president in his second term, and we all know why. READ MORE >>

 Abbas Milani is the Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford, where he is also a co-director of Iranian studies at Stanford. His last book is Eminent Persians: The Men and Women who Made Modern Iran (Syracuse University Press, 2008). READ MORE >>

What we are witnessing right now in the streets of Tehran is, first and foremost, a political battle for the future of the Iranian state. But closely linked to this political fight is also an old theological dispute about the nature of Shiism--a dispute that has been roiling Iran for more than a century. READ MORE >>