LARRY DIAMOND, a Current History contributing editor, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (Times Books, 2005). In 2004 he served as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

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Since the fall of the Shah's regime in 1979, the United States has lacked a viable and coherent policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. Now more than ever, the United States must develop a new grand strategy that addresses all three principal U.S. national interests in the country. U.S. policy must seek to halt the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb, to end the regime's support of terrorist groups, and to foster democratic change in Tehran.

Two political scientists comment on Thomas Ambrosio's The Geopolitics

of Demographic Decay: HIV/AIDS and Russia's Great-Power Status (Post-Soviet

Affairs, 22, 1, January-March 2006).

Ambrosio's three indicators of great-power capacity, Russia's society, military, and economy, are reviewed in terms of his argument about how the projected effects of HIV/AIDS weakens each factor.

In most resource-rich countries, natural wealth does not translate into prosperity for the majority of inhabitants, but instead leads to environmental and economic devastation, and hampers democratic reform.

Only an informed public can hold leaders to account. Yet local reporting often overlooks the legal, economic, and environmental implications of resource extraction. Covering Oil: A Reporter's Guide to Energy and Development, a collaborative work of the Open Society Institute's Revenue Watch program and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, aims to encourage rigorous reporting on these issues by providing practical information about the petroleum industry and the impact of resource wealth on a producing country.

The guidebook comes out of a series of workshops for journalists in the oil-exporting countries of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria, during which participants expressed a need for more information to help them understand the issues surrounding resource exploitation. In response to these consultations, Covering Oil outlines the fundamentals of petroleum contracts, provides a glossary of relevant economic theory, and presents case studies of major public policy issues.

Covering Oil is the second in a series of Revenue Watch guidebooks targeting various audiences involved in the promotion of transparency and democratic accountability. The first, Follow the Money: A Guide to Monitoring Budgets and Oil and Gas Revenues, was aimed at nongovernmental organizations.

In the fall of 2003, Stanford professor Larry Diamond received a call from Condoleezza Rice, asking if he would spend several months in Baghdad as an adviser to the American occupation authorities. Diamond had not been a supporter of the war in Iraq, but he felt that the task of building a viable democracy was a worthy goal. But when he went to Iraq, his experiences proved to be more of an education than he bargained for.

Squandered Victory is Diamond's provocative and vivid account of how the American effort to establish democracy in Iraq was hampered not only by insurgents and terrorists but also by a long chain of miscalculations, missed opportunities, and acts of ideological blindness that helped assure that the transition to independence would be neither peaceful nor entirely democratic. And in a new Afterword for the paperback edition, Diamond shows how the ongoing instability in Iraq is a direct result of the shortsighted choices made during the fourteen months of the American occupation and the subsequent Iraqi interim government.

he mid-2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as Iran's new president left those committed to democratic change in the country feeling shocked and disappointed. At first glance, his victory seemed to signal not only the consolidation of Iran's ruling Islamist autocracy, but also the rejection in principle of democracy and the revival of the ideas and goals of the revolutionary Islamic Republic. While few had thought that another "reformist" would replace outgoing two-term president Mohammad Khatami, just as few had forecast that a "conservative" with Ahmedinejad's hard-line credentials would win. True, a reassertion of conservative political and economic power had been rolling forward for several years. Its most recent milestone had been the fraudulent February 2004 parliamentary elections, which had turned a one-time pocket of reformism into another tame preserve run by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his agents.1 More of the same might have been anticipated in the case of the post-Khatami presidency, but Ahmedinejad seemed worse than expectednot merely a Khamenei crony, but a true believer in the antidemocratic and antiliberal dictates of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Fortunately, pronouncements of the death of democracy in Iran are premature.

In this Article, we describe an emerging arena of global administration. We claim that this arena, not bounded by a state, raises accountability problems of a kind different from those addressed by conventional administrative law. And we argue that measures designed to address these problems will have potentially large implications for democratic theory and practice. Our argument starts from the premise—stated here without nuance—that something new is happening politically beyond the borders of individual states and irreducible to their voluntary interactions. To distinguish these developments from what is commonly called “international law and politics,” we use the term “global politics.” The emergence of global politics is marked by a proliferation of political settings beyond domestic boundaries. This proliferation expands the range of relevant political actors, while shifting our understanding of political units and of relations among them: the emergence of human rights as limits on Westphalian sovereignty was a first step in this shift, but not the last.

The latest volume in this popular series focuses on the best ways to evaluate and improve the quality of new democratic regimes. The essays in part one elaborate and refine several themes of democratic quality: the rule of law, accountability, freedom, equality, and responsiveness. The second part features six comparative cases, each of which applies these thematic elements to two neighboring countries: Brazil and Chile, South Africa and Ghana, Italy and Spain, Romania and Poland, India and Bangladesh, and Taiwan and Korea.