Word: brought
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...dignity. This country is beautiful - the problem lies with the installed regimes and landed aristocracy, all kept in power by Western interests. Our democrats and demagogues backed by the West effect little. All the while, magazines like this refuse to address the larger history at play that has brought us to this mess. It seems the less we talk about the legacy of the Cold War, the U.S. thirst for oil and the specious war on terror, the better. Danish Azar Zuby, Karachi...
Still, the presidency is far from unimportant. It is a critical part of the "managed democracy" that the ruling clerics have used to govern Iran for the last three decades. Khamenei himself is a former President. The job is important enough to have brought millions of Iranians to the polls on Friday, and thousands into the streets afterwards - both supporters of the apparent loser, reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and members of the radical volunteer paramilitary forces who support the reelected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (See pictures of Iran's controversial and violent election...
...very way Iran is ruled is now in convulsion. Since the revolution of 1979 brought on the Islamic Republic, Iran has been governed by a power structure that combines unelected clerics with an elected legislature and presidency. Under the revolution's principle of velayat e-faqi or "guardianship of the jurisprudent," ultimate political authority rests in the hands of the Shi'ite clergy, first among them the Supreme Leader, chosen by an unelected Assembly of Experts. Still, the regime always sought to affirm its legitimacy through holding elections for parliament and the president...
...campaign of terror carried out by poorer young people against what he decried as the more liberal, "bourgeois" elements of the communist party, so does Ahmadinejad claim to be waging a class war, with the backing of the poor and the security forces, against a corrupt political elite brought to power by the revolution. And he clearly has Khamenei's backing...
...specter of an Islamist threat has often worked in favor of the region's governments. After 9/11, U.S. Central Asian strategy was dictated largely by the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld. Uzbekistan, ruled its entire independent life by the iron-fisted Islam Karimov, was brought into the fold as a staging ground for American operations in Afghanistan, as well as a willing accomplice in the renditions of suspected terrorists. That cozy partnership ended in 2005 when the Uzbek army gunned down hundreds of civilians protesting for reform in the Ferghana Valley under the pretense that it was curbing...