A little over a month ago Akbar Ganji received the Milton Friedman Award for Advancing Liberty from the CATO Institute. As much as the namesake of such an award makes it difficult for me to hold down my lunch as I write it, the speech Ganji made accepting the award probably did not cover what CATO expected and it certainly is worth a read for any student of US foreign policy in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world.
Who is Akbar Ganji, you might ask? Well, I think the quickest explanation I can give is that he's the Alexander Solzhenitsyn of Iran.
On the US Foreign Policy side, Congress decided yesterday, by overwhelming margins, that continuing the same stupid and counterproductive policies of the last 30 years are just what we should be doing. Sanctions have not worked yet, maybe they will work this time. Of course it helps that Likud has repeatedly said that they want "crippling sanctions" for Iran.
