Postmodernists long ago disabused us of the idea that texts have stable, fixed meanings. French literary critics like Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes introduced a vision of the text as a tricky, shape-shifting improvisation; their American disciples like Stanley Fish proposed that these texts only acquire meaning through the efforts of interpretive communities. The relevance ...

On Wednesday at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., a debate took place on U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran. You can listen to it here, and read a transcript here.
The central question of the evening was “Engagement or Regime Change?” In one corner: Michael Ledeen, a proponent for regime change in Tehran ever since the ...

“If you can talk to an insurgency that kills Americans, it should be easy to talk to ones that don’t,” Mark Perry tells me on the phone. Perry is author of the recently published Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage With Its Enemies, a book documenting his meetings with terrorists around the Middle East, ...

“We don’t know of a single ‘Western scholar’ or ‘policy wonk’ … who thinks that access to the Iranian regime is going to make them powerful, rich, or both,” Flynt Leverett and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, recently wrote on their website, raceforiran.com. The two Iran lobbyists were responding to my profile of them in ...

The is the second in a two-part series. Read the first part here.
Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council, wants to be the face of the Iranian-American lobby in Washington. The other pillar of Washington’s Iran lobby, Flynt Leverett and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, have accumulated power and influence by executing the ...

First in a two-part series on the dueling Iran lobbies in Washington.
Flynt Leverett is fielding questions from an audience at the New American Foundation for a panel titled “What the Iranian People Really Think,” and the crowd—at least the Iranian part of it—is starting to get hostile. When Leverett cites poll numbers suggesting that Mahmoud ...

Mohsen Sazegara is sipping tea at Starbucks to ease his flu. The temperature is below freezing in Georgetown, and the 55-year-old Iranian-rights activist has his sweater buttoned up to his chin. A compact and balding man in glasses, Sazegara came to Washington four years ago for heart surgery after undergoing an eye operation in London ...

“Where’s the synagogue?” I ask a young solider in a beret. A member of the large security detail guarding the Lebanese prime minister’s residence, he is leaning against a jeep and cradling an automatic weapon in one hand. He pulls on a cigarette and regards me warily. I am a foreigner asking directions to a ...

The Saudi Embassy is covered in snow, and U.S. Foreign Service officers on their lunch breaks in Foggy Bottom skid by and giggle. Washington is notoriously incapable of digging itself out from under, and almost a year into the Obama administration, it seems the Saudis are having the same problem. For years, the Saudis have ...