Reese Erlich and Muhammed Sahimi take listeners on a tour of domestic and regional politics and US imperial intervention throughout the Middle East and central Asia. How do we understand the current clash between opposition forces and the Ahmadinejad against the backdrop of ongoing US threats, the 1979 Iranian revolution, and the long arm of US intervention stretching back decades? Can the US "win" the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan? What to make of the controversial recent elections in Iraq and will the US pull out of Iraq, as promised, by the end of 2011? What forces are driving US policy in the region and what forces exist that can effectively push back against US domination? Reese Erlich is an award-winning journalist and author of The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of US Policy and the Middle East and the forthcoming book Conversations with Terrorists. Mohammed Sahimi is a Professor at the University of Southern California and a correspondent for The Tehran Bureau, the most widely circulated English-language online news source on Iran.