Word: hossein
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...implausible that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won in a landslide re-election. It is doubtful that he not only took the capital city, Tehran - the heart of the reformist movement - by a staggering 50% but also managed to win in Azerbaijan, the birthplace of his chief rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, by a 4-to-1 margin. (As an Azeri friend of mine said, this would be akin to Senator John McCain winning the African-American vote against Barack Obama.) It seems odd that the election was called so soon after the polls had closed, despite the many millions of ballots still...
...election and its aftermath appear to have surprised all the major players, forcing them to improvise their responses to a fast-changing situation. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei appear to have been taken aback by the surge in support for the pragmatic conservative candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The decision to hastily announce what many say was an improbable landslide victory for Ahmadinejad touched off an unprecedented wave of protests that have rocked Khamenei, who has since backtracked by ordering an investigation into claims of voter fraud. Despite violent attacks on demonstrators and arrests of political figures...
...option" of a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown would be a potentially fatal injury to the regime's sources of legitimacy: its limited but lively democracy and the backing of Shi'ite clergy. Discord among the mullahs is growing, with some senior clerics, like the esteemed house-arrested dissident Ayatullah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, publicly condemning Khamenei's handling of the election and warning ordinary soldiers and police officers that they would "answer to God" for any violence against the people. A crackdown would risk reducing a regime built on clerical authority and "managed" democracy to a tyranny on par with...
Before we go too far down the road cheering the forces of Iranian democracy, let's not forget that its public face, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, has American blood on his hands. He was Iran's Prime Minister during most of the 1980s, a time when the country was waging a terrorist campaign against...
...present at the creation of the country's Iranian-backed, Shi'ite militia Hizballah in 1982 and on familiar terms with its most radical and violent members. He wrote: "Are you people crazy backing Mousavi, a patron of Hizballah's terrorist wing?" (See behind-the-scenes pictures of Mir-Hossein Mousavi...