Word: abdi
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...separate interviews, conducted in Tehran over cups of tea, plates of sugary cookies and in one case a late-night pizza to go, Asgharzadeh and top planners Mohsen Mirdammadi, today a political-science professor, and Abbas Abdi, an outspoken newspaper editor, revealed fresh insights into their moment of history. They denied, to start with, that Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini had put them up to it. "The idea came to me while I was studying," Asgharzadeh recalled, joking. "I didn't mind getting away from the books...
...Abdi, 43, has had the most difficult time. In 1993, he spent eight months in solitary confinement for criticizing the clerics' failure to abide by democratic practices set down by the nation's 1979 constitution. Yet he has remained a leading strategist in Khatami's new Participation Party and is one of the architects of Iranian detente with the West. In 1998, ignoring the howls of the hard-liners, Abdi traveled to Paris and met with former hostage Barry Rosen, achieving a reconciliation of sorts. A sign of Abdi's influence: last summer's student riots began with a protest...
...Abdi and the others can still scarcely help themselves when it comes to blaming America for Iran's ills. Asgharzadeh says he is willing to say he's sorry if the repentance is mutual, but Mirdammadi disagrees: "I am sure that we will never apologize to America." Abdi is not looking for a lovefest but wants mutual respect and diplomatic relations for the sake of Iran's national interest. As he puts it, "The Americans were a nuisance to us, and we were a nuisance to them. Perhaps now we can talk to each other on an equal footing...
Americans may not follow the logic. Yet Abdi's words are more encouraging than the all-too-familiar ones scrawled across the wall of the former U.S. embassy. The pine-shaded, 27-acre compound has been occupied since the early '80s by Revolutionary Guards, who use part of it as a high school. Next to a mural of the Statue of Liberty, styled as a ghoulish skeleton, is the freshly painted warning: WE WILL MAKE AMERICA FACE A SEVERE DEFEAT...
...siege experience] for positive purposes. It has made me stronger and more understanding as a person. I want to be hopeful about U.S.-Iran relations. Abdi has apologized privately to me in a very sincere way. But it has been physiologically difficult. When I hear a car backfiring, I still jump...