U.S. guarantees
of continued commitment.

Cultural links are also strong to Iran; when I first studied in the
Islamic Republic in the mid-1990s, my apartment was in Julfa, Isfahan’s
chief Armenian neighborhood. The Armenian community need not drop its
advocacy for recognition of the Armenian genocide, but by ignoring
Armenia’s pro-Iranian orientation, the Armenian-American community
squanders an opportunity to build a true strategic partnership between
Washington and Yerevan, a partnership which would certainly be to both
countries’ benefit.

On
Tuesday, the prestigious Forbes magazine published a list of the
world’s ten worst economies in which Armenia occupies the second place
next to Madagascar. Forbes has selected the worst ten
economies from among 117 countries according to three-year average
statistics for gross domestic product growth and inflation (including
the International Monetary Fund’s 2012 estimates), plus GDP per capita
and the current account balance, a measure ofwhether the country is
importing more than it exports.Compared with the list for 2010,
significant changes have taken place this year. While the previous
release included mostly African nations, this year the list also
includes Ukraine (4th position), Kyrgyzstan (7th) and Iran (10th). The
authors of the research consider not only the economic crisis, but also
mismanagement, corruption as causes of the decline of economies.“Onetime
losers like Ghana and Zimbabwe got their economic acts together and
moved off the list while some countries, including Armenia and Jamaica,
marched into the lower ranks primarily because of the global financial
crisis. Others, like Madagascar and Nicaragua, earned their positions
almost entirely due to the ineptitude of their rulers. It should come
as no surprise that eight of the 10 worst economies also were in the
bottom quartile of countries in Transparency International’s Global
Corruption