It was past midnight December 10, 1948, in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations, in the Palais de Chaillot, place du Trocadero in

Some fifty-nine former ambassadors and officials have signed a letter to the U.S. Senate against the nomination of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has proposed a series of reforms of the world organization, including new rules for use of military force and adopting

When I first met Cyrus Ghani at a party in the mid-1960s in Tehran, I was amazed by his fantastic memory. He remembered almost every

As the American presidential campaign unfolds, some of the questions debated among the candidates and/or in the press seem baffling if not totally alien to

As a student in Beirut, Lebanon, in the 1930s, like my non-European school mates, I leaned toward the left. Living under French rule since the

A recent Harvard book (1) reminds the public about the controversy provoked by New York Times' Walter Duranty reports from the Soviet Union and the

Twenty-five years of uninterrupted Iranian autocratic theocracy confront us with a basic question: How a group of incompetent and often corrupt lower ranking clerics were

Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men depicts events that led to the fall of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh's government in August 1953. As usual, the

On August 6 ,1945 , at 5 PM , I crossed the door sill of Paradise Cafe. Sadegh Hedayat had asked me the day before

Adapted and summarized from chapter 2 of my new book, The Shah and the Ayatollah (Praeger ,2003). Permanence and Contuinity Continuity is the hallmark of

I have recently found in a forgotten file dating back more than twenty years, several press snippets about the last days of Mohammad Reza Shah.

For the first time in half a century, an American president has proposed the only “lasting” solution to the Palestinian problem: building a practicing democracy

It is high time for Muslims in general and Arabs in particular to stop accusing others of their awkward and largely self-inflicted predicament. It is

On October 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam, which, he said, could lead to a peaceful  settlement

One day back in 1957, when I was living in Paris, I stumbled on the following dispatch in The International Herald Tribune: IRAN BUREAU BANS