Word: iranian
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...Khamenei. There is a constitutional tension between those two offices, a tension that may have been heightened in the past year by Ahmadinejad's close relationship with Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Corps is a strange institution. It is an extremist religious militia that exists outside the Iranian state apparatus. It is funded by semiprivate charitable institutions, called bonyads, that manage the Shah's confiscated assets, which are enormous. The bonyads aren't part of the government, either. They-and the Revolutionary Guards-are the patrons of Iran's external terrorist organization, Hizballah. In fact, there are Iranian Revolutionary...
...difficult for Ahmadinejad to send the message, via the Guards, to both Hizballah and the military wing of Hamas, which is based in Damascus and funded in part by Iran: Let's rile up the Israelis and start a crisis. Let's change the subject from the Iranian nuclear negotiations. At the very least, let's lay down an opening marker in the negotiations: If you mess with Iran, we have a multitude of ways to mess with you. Just a theory, of course. "We really don't have any real idea about what goes on inside that government...
...Indeed, last week's Middle East confrontation had Bush-folly written all over it-and not just because the Iranian government's cowboy faction might be strutting its stuff. Bush's failure to patiently broker a real Middle East settlement-mostly because he refused to speak to Yasser Arafat or demand concessions from the Israelis-helped lead to Israel's unilateral withdrawal policy in Gaza. Peace isn't made unilaterally. An unstated part of Israeli policy was that provocations by Hamas and Hizballah would have to be met with real force, lest it seem that Israel was merely retreating from...
...attack U.S. troops in retaliation. The most chilling scenario is that the Israeli-Lebanese dispute could grow into a wider war, if Hizballah's backers in Iran or Syria decide or are provoked to join the fray--a possibility that grew when Israeli intelligence claimed on Saturday that Iranian forces helped Hizballah fighters hit an Israeli ship off the coast of Beirut, killing one sailor. (Iran denies the charge.) "It will never completely cool down," says Edward Luttwak, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "When the Israelis have hit enough targets, they...
...since Ahmadinejad rushed to warn Israel about the consequences of extending its offensive to Syria: "[This] will be equivalent to an attack on the whole Islamic world, and [Israel] will face a crushing response," he said during a phone conversation with Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to the official Iranian news agency...