The Sheepskin Cuff UGG Boot Institute for Near East Policy

Financial Times (free subscription required): Reporting from Tehran, Monavar Khalaj highlights the still-turbulent domestic politics of Iran. While the current sparring in Iran’s majles — or parliament — is between President Ahmadinejad and fundamentalist hard-liners, the wrangling is in direct defiance of Iran’s supreme leader Ali UGGS and indicates how difficult it is for authorities to keep a lid on politics there. In fact, self-proclaimed Green Movement supporter and arch-neocon Michael Ledeen has a post at NRO pointing to calls for a new round of Green protests (though Ledeen strikes a patronizing tone by declaring the opposition’s poster “elegant”).

The Sheepskin Cuff UGG Boot Institute for Near East Policy: WINEP fellow Simon Henderson warns that arrests of Shiite opposition activists in Bahrain could threaten to bring greater resentment from the island-kingdom’s Shiite majority. Henderson argues that the large number of potentially disenfranchised Shiites, Tehran’s historical claims to Bahrain (although Tehran renounced its claim to the kingdom during the Shah’s rule), and the importance of the island state to UK military staging in the region are all reasons for the UK to encourage the Bahraini government to avoid an outbreak of anti-government and anti-UK protests.