Word: cairo
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...regime. Khamenei and various flunkies also blamed the U.S., especially the CIA, for the unrest, but the attacks on the Great Satan were muted - a curious development. Was it due to Barack Obama's initial, temperate response to the rigged election results? Was it a recognition that Obama's Cairo speech and New Year's greeting to the Iranian people had made him popular across the Persian political spectrum, a less convincing Satan than George W. Bush had been? Was it a pragmatic recognition that one way for the regime to regain credibility with its own people would...
...course, Uncle Napoleon had a point. Iran has been a long-standing target of foreign meddling. It was not just the CIA-assisted coup in 1953 against the popular democratic Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, which Obama mentioned in his Cairo speech. It was also the Western support for the Shah and, worst of all in the minds of Iranians, the U.S. support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, including the provision of chemicals that Saddam used to concoct poison gas. This remains an open wound in Iran. (See "In Tehran, Terror in Plain Clothes...
...pressure on Israel, hasn't taken an explicit stance on the settlements dispute. Obama has also surrounded himself with the kind of advisers (Rahm Emanuel, Hillary Clinton and Dennis Ross) and made the kind of symbolic gestures (holding a seder at the White House and condemning Holocaust denial in Cairo) that reassure many American Jews. Historically, Israel's American supporters have used their strength in Congress to box Presidents in a corner. But when Netanyahu came to Washington last month, even reliably pro-Israel Jewish members of Congress gave him an earful on settlements. (Watch a video about Israel...
...said, referring to the CIA's participation in the 1953 overthrow of the Mohammed Mossadegh government. "We have not frozen your assets. We don't have sanctions against you." (Of all the reformers, only Mousavi seemed to think that Obama's acknowledgment of the 1953 coup in his Cairo speech was a "positive step...
Netanyahu was reportedly shocked to discover, during his recent Washington trip, that Obama's position on settlements had the backing of many key friends of Israel on Capitol Hill. The President, in his Cairo speech, reaffirmed a rock-solid bond with Israel based on ensuring its security in a hostile environment. But that support doesn't translate into condoning the "Greater Israel" expansion into occupied territories represented by the settlements, which play little role in Israel's security today except as a drain on resources. A settlement freeze, conceived in the so-called Road Map to peace (first outlined...