Word: iranian
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...would be foolish for an American to come by and gawk at the "den of espionage," the Iranian government's name for the former U.S. embassy in the Islamic republic's capital. Even without the newly reinforced restrictions and spasms of street violence, this would be a strange place for anyone with U.S. citizenship to visit. For this is ground zero in the tragic history of U.S.-Iran relations: the staging ground of the 1953 CIA plot that overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran, the locus for the prolonged showdown in 1979 when 53 American diplomats were taken hostage...
While tourists do come by the walls to stare inside, the place is not open for sightseeing. The compound has a more important function for the Iranian government. The regime's shock troops, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, referred to as Sepah in Farsi, use the main building - which resembles a high school gym in shape and size - to train its members. For the past month, they have participated in the government's brutal response to mass demonstrations by beating protesters in the streets with truncheons and overseeing the notorious Basij militia, a paramilitary group that has been accused...
...while the old embassy, which is impeccably maintained by the Revolutionary Guards, may reflect the official anti-American stance of the government, that policy is increasingly in conflict with popular attitudes. "We want the world to know that the Iranian government is not the same as the Iranian people," an engineering graduate student says at a park in the north of the city. "We Iranians have no problems with America." (See pictures of the global protests against the results of Iran's presidential election...
Granted, some Iranians have little taste for American culture, but they see immigration to the U.S. and Europe as a way to escape the increasingly repressive regime. The brain drain has been a pressing problem for years, but the presidential election and its fallout has quickened its pace. An Iranian student who is supposed to enter a university in New England this fall says that worsening relations may have dashed his chance to secure an American visa (stories abound of Iranians waiting upwards of a year to hear about their applications). "We cannot stay in this country," he says...
...Turning a blind eye to the Iranian government's crackdown may strike some as a betrayal of the million of Iranians who took to the streets. But the reality is that without an agreement over Iran's nuclear program, a nuclear arms race in the Middle East will threaten far more lives than club-wielding Iranian policemen...