Amir Taheri

“Today we are actively and selflessly present in all domains of national life in the service of our Great Leader and martyrdom-seeking people.” This was how two-star General Hussein Salami, Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), boasted about his force’s role in Iran. Leaving…

In one of those outbursts that he specializes in Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s nominee for the US Presidency, called his Democrat rival, Vice-President Kamala Harris, a “Communist.” Since I doubt that Ms. Harris has anything but the faintest notion about Communism, a zombie ideology that…

The good news from Iran is that there isn’t going to be any change in the way the Islamic Republic has always behaved. This is to say the “ Supreme Guide” has decided to swallow his latest humiliation caused by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran and refrain from seeking “hard…

Many had dismissed it as a costly indulgence for a nation facing economic hardship while some condemned it as a dangerous diversion from the deepest political crisis France faces since the 1950s. And, yet, the two-week’ long summer Olympics hosted by Paris is now universally lauded as a success in…

"Today he is the bravest, the wisest and the most popular leader of the Resistance Front." This is how the daily Kayhan spoke of guess who. Wrong guess. The daily's editorialists are notorious for their exaggerated praise of the "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei. But this time it was not Khamenei…

Could Pezeshkian be Iran’s Gorbachev? Referring to President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian, the question was headlined in a Tehran daily Tuesday and triggered a torrent of comments. The paper’s commentator described Pezeshkian as a man trusted by the system and thus capable of introducing unspecified…

Barring another surprise “event” the coming US presidential showdown is likely to be a duel between former President Donald Trump and Vice-President Kamala Harris. That duel, if it goes through, will include a number of new features. Harris is only the second woman to reach the last round in a US…

Last week, Republicans were back under the Republican Party’s convention limelight in Milwaukee. This time they looked as determined to send Donald J Trump to the White House in November as they were in 2016. Eight years ago, Trump looked like a bolt out of the blue that though threatening the…

In his “A Tale of Two Cities” English novelist Charles Dickens uses the French Revolution as a background for the claim, never openly stated, for superiority of the British political system. Here are two European nations tracing their ancestry to ancient Greece and Rome and cradled in Christian…

Barring a surprise which is still possible, on Sunday France may have its first elected ultra-right government led by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly National Front). The only other time that that brand of politics emerged as government in France was in the 1940s under Marshal Petain and…