{"id":9347,"date":"2011-02-23T14:13:02","date_gmt":"2011-02-23T22:13:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=9347"},"modified":"2011-02-25T08:01:56","modified_gmt":"2011-02-25T16:01:56","slug":"thursday-iran-talking-points-26","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/23\/thursday-iran-talking-points-26\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday Iran Talking Points"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lobelog.com\/\">LobeLog<\/a>: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for February 23rd, 2011:<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052748703373404576148040816771586.html?mod=googlenews_wsj\">The Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/em>: The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rightweb.irc-online.org\/profile\/Foundation_for_Defense_of_Democracies\">Foundation for Defense of Democracies<\/a>\u2019 <a href=\"http:\/\/rightweb.irc-online.org\/profile\/Ottolenghi_Emanuele\">Emanuele Ottolenghi<\/a> opines, \u201cArabs\u2019 revolutionary awakening belies Western conventional wisdom in the Middle East,\u201d and repeats a linkage-denying argument that \u201cordinary Arabs who rose against their regimes didn\u2019t do so because they wanted to free Palestine, but because they wanted to free themselves.\u201d Ottolenghi rejects the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lobelog.com\/petraeus-confirms-link-between-israel-palestine-and-u-s-security\/\">linkage argument<\/a>, a view <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lobelog.com\/klein-and-chesnoff-obama-admin-gets-linkage\/\">promoted by the Obama administration<\/a>, which posits that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a crucial step in addressing regional problems in the Middle East. He concludes, \u201cThe conventional wisdom that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the mother of all problems in the region has now been exposed as nothing but a myth. Will Western leaders finally learn?\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.therecord.com\/opinion\/columns\/article\/490736--supporting-iranian-greens-is-the-only-american-option\">The Waterloo Record<\/a><\/em>: Senior Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Ray Takeyh writes, \u201cit is all too obvious that the only option the United States has in altering the Islamic Republic\u2019s behaviour is to support the \u2018green movement.\u2019\u201d Takeyh acknowledges that the \u201cmilitary option\u201d has \u201cnow become implausible\u201d and discards the potential of negotiations, observing, \u201cTehran\u2019s callous leadership, indifferent to the financial penalties of its nuclear truculence, was hardly prone to make cost-benefit assessments and constructively participate in negotiations.\u201d He concludes that the Green Movement should \u201cbe beneficiaries of advice and assistance\u201d from the U.S. \u201cWhether motivated by idealism or a desire to advance practical security concerns, the West must recognize that the only thing standing between the mullahs and the bomb is the green movement,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for February 23rd, 2011: The Wall Street Journal: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies\u2019 Emanuele Ottolenghi opines, \u201cArabs\u2019 revolutionary awakening belies Western conventional wisdom in the Middle East,\u201d and repeats a linkage-denying argument that \u201cordinary Arabs who rose against their regimes didn\u2019t do so because they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-9347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9347"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9354,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9347\/revisions\/9354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9347"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}