Word: iranianized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...knowledge of any Iranian nuclear bomb, with only a little exaggeration, is reduced to Google maps, the words of exiles with axes to grind and shady defectors, and studies by think tanks as ill informed as the rest of us. (Read "Power to Chaos - Tracking Iran's Four-Month Slide...
When Iran's parliament confirmed 18 of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 21 candidates for his Cabinet in early September, only those who sift the tea leaves of Iranian politics noticed the confirmation of Haidar Moslehi, a member of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), as Minister of Intelligence and Security. For decades, the ministry represented a check on the IRGC's rise toward becoming Iran's most powerful institution: domestic intelligence was out of the guards' reach. With Moslehi's appointment, there is nobody left to guard the guards...
...military hardware and best facilities. They even set up their own university. Now the guard - sepah in Farsi - has evolved into what a study by the Rand Corp.'s National Defense Research Institute describes as an "expansive socio-political-economic conglomerate whose influence extends into virtually every corner of Iranian political life and society." Its commercial interests run into the billions of dollars and range from massive infrastructure projects to laser eye surgery. And in addition to the Intelligence Ministry, guardsmen control the ministries of Defense, Oil and the Interior...
...Iraq. But some analysts think that growing commercial interests may have taken the edge off the guards' religious zealotry, which, if true, might make them open to dialogue one day. "They are pretty practical; they use ideology as a tool," says Mark Fowler of Persia House, which monitors Iranian developments. "They support the Islamic revolution because it has been good to them, but they are not raving fanatics." Says Hillary Mann Leverett, a former director of Iran and Afghanistan affairs in George W. Bush's National Security Council: "These people are not just shock troops for the regime. They...
...backed the European-led diplomacy. Whereas William Burns, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, had been restricted from delivering much more than prepared remarks at the last meeting of this forum in 2008, this time he held what U.S. officials called a "significant conversation" directly with his Iranian counterpart, Jalili, on the sidelines - the highest level of direct conversation between the U.S. and Iran in decades. State Department spokesman Robert Wood described it as a "frank exchange" on the nuclear issue and other questions, including human rights, but stressed that its contents were confidential...