Word: iranian
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GHOLAMHOSSEIN ELHAM, Iranian government spokesman, about the film 300, which depicts a battle in 480 B.C. when the massive Persian army was held off for three days by a small band of Spartan soldiers...
...scene was like the Iranian answer to March Madness. At Amir Kabir University of Technology in Tehran this past December, a crowd of several thousand packed the school's auditorium. On one side were hundreds of members of the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary force controlled by Iranian hard-liners, who had been bused in to cheer their most prominent alumnus, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They waved placards and roared as Ahmadinejad boasted about Iran's growing power and dared the country's enemies to challenge it. But in the back of the room, a group of 50 activists burned...
This is not the image of Ahmadinejad-- the bombastic, headline-grabbing populist --the world has grown used to. Since his election in 2005, Ahmadinejad has become the most prominent Iranian on the global stage since Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the guiding hand of the country's 1979 Islamic revolution. Ahmadinejad owes his visibility partly to Iran's rise as a regional power and partly to his penchant for spouting what U.S. Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns calls "the most abhorrent, irresponsible rhetoric of any global leader in many years." It's that rhetoric, along with Iran's meddling in Iraq...
...Tehran's nuclear program, its relationship with Washington and the potential for another war in the Middle East. Inside Iran's political establishment, Ahmadinejad has provoked a counterreaction from those who believe his posturing has damaged Iran's economy and its hopes for a rapprochement with the West. Most Iranian leaders and the public believe in Iran's right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. But a real split has emerged between hard-liners allied with Ahmadinejad, who are willing to risk international sanctions and even the threat of a U.S. military strike in a quest to become a nuclear...
...problem with such a plan is that Iran might use both the knowledge and the enriched uranium from consortium plants to pursue a secret bomb-making program. That is why any such outcome should be accompanied by other safeguards: involvement by the international consortium in all Iranian nuclear facilities rather than just the enrichment sites, an agreement that there can be snap intrusive inspections of any facility, a verifiable cap on Iran's production of enriched uranium and a requirement that no facilities be hidden or buried...