Former CIA executive and Georgetown University professor Paul R. Pillar believes that Israel is not in the position to question the legality of Iran’s nuclear program or resort to false excuses to attack Iran on its own or with the sponsorship of the United States.

In order to investigate the different aspects of the U.S. and Israel’s approach to the Iran’s nuclear program in general, and the red lines which the officials in Washington and Tel Aviv have been drawing for Iran, we have begun doing a set of interviews with renowned political scientists and authors from across the world and asked them their viewpoints about the possible scenarios which may take place in the course of the confrontation which the United States and Israel have set out against Iran. Our first interviewee is Prof. Stephen Zunes.

The sectarian violence is on the rise in the Middle East, but it is a created and fabricated reality not a natural one. For centuries different branches of Islam were living together in a peaceful and respectful manner. If we look closely at the last decade of sectarian violence that has erupted in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria, we find that these conflicts have two main targets: Shia communities and Iran.

Although the US Secretary of State John Kerry had already requested the United States Congress to avoid passing new sanctions against Iran before the results of the upcoming presidential poll become available, approval of new sanctions against Iran and the Nuclear Iran Prevention Act by the House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Relations proved that the American lawmakers have not taken Kerry’s request seriously. 

Perhaps, it would be no exaggeration if one claimed that the biggest war which is currently raging in the Middle East region is a war between Shia and Sunni Muslims. Not a single day passes by without mass media releasing reports about bomb attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. At the same time, the ongoing civil war in Syria is taking more of an ethnic and religious turn as time goes by. So, would it be exaggeration to talk about the war between Shias and Sunnis in Iraq?

Although over two weeks have passed since the twin bomb attacks targeted the annual Boston Marathon in the United States, claiming three lives and leaving a great number of the American citizens injured, speculations and analyses related to this development still draw a lot of attention from analytical and media circles. In the meantime, the issue which has been attached the highest importance was the nationality of two suspects associated with the bombings in Boston and their possible links to a wider network of religious extremism and terrorism. 

To study the different aspects of the sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and the European Union, Iran Review has conducted a series of interviews with world-renowned political scientists, lawyers, journalists and authors and asked them some questions on the humanitarian and legal impacts of the sanctions, their compatibility with the international law and the human right standards, etc. Our today’s interviewee is Prof. Flynt Leverett, a prominent Iran expert. 

In the existing conditions, the first confidence building measure to be taken by the West is to recognize Iran's right to enrich uranium after which the Western states can move to announce a schedule for the revocation of all anti-Iran sanctions as well as the best way to do it. In fact, the P5+1 group should specify what steps it wants to take so that Iran would be able to better adapt its reaction to the West’s demands.

An anti-Iran separatist group recently held its meeting attended by secessionist figures in the Republic of Azerbaijan’s capital city of Baku. Hosting of such meetings under the existing condition of bilateral relations will only exacerbate the situation. Therefore steps should be taken in order to improve Tehran-Baku ties.

While Almaty 2 negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers ended without reaching a conclusive result, most experts, even the Western ones, still insist that the negotiations have not been a failure. At the same time, both Iran's chief negotiator, Saeed Jalili, and his counterpart in the P5+1, Catherine Ashton, have admitted that there are still wide gaps between the two sides and – as put by Ashton – the two sides are “far apart on the substance” of the negotiations.