Word: khomeini
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...safer place for the sheik to be. Since he first rose to global prominence last February, the state-influenced Egyptian press has been warning darkly of a "crisis" in U.S.-Egyptian relations. Rattled by reports in the U.S. media that depicted Abdel Rahman as "a new Khomeini" and Egypt as a state on the edge of a fundamentalist revolution, Egyptians sniped back that the Americans were bungling the entire affair and turning an otherwise inconsequential cleric into a hero for Egypt's disaffected youth. Mubarak was quoted in the Egyptian press as saying "the sheik has been a CIA agent...
...perfectly capable of presenting two faces to the outside world: the responsible, reasoned face that solicits Western loans and investments, and the rigid, ideological face that accepts murder and lies as tools of statecraft. "Iran is in a sense more dangerous today than it was under Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini," says a senior British diplomat. "Then the antagonism to the West was blatant. Now it is more nuanced...
Four and a half years after the end of Iran's disastrous war with Iraq, nearly four years after Ayatullah Khomeini's death, a happier national spirit is struggling to emerge. The problem for outsiders is to square what sometimes appears to be a Persian lamb with a notably lion-like personality. The superficial prosperity of Tehran is illusory. Because of war and runaway population growth -- estimated at 3.6% a year, though that may be declining -- per capita economic output has shrunk about 40% since 1979. Many factories are running at only 40% to 50% of capacity...
More important, Abdelkarim Soroush, a leading intellectual of the anti-Shah revolution, has openly challenged the clergy's infallibility. "Religion is sacred," he said in an interview, "but the understanding and interpretation are not necessarily sacred." Religious interpretations, he said, "are like chemistry and mathematics. They are debatable." Khomeini's heirs will increasingly have to reconcile the everyday requirements of national life with the exigencies of holy law. If they also intend to be taken seriously in the community of nations, they will have to stop using violence and terror in the pursuit of Iran's interests...
...George Bush was understandably puzzled, almost to the point of paralysis. He thought he had done everything right -- won the cold war, won a hot war, made a showy raid on Panama, brought down the yellow ribbons, brought on the victory parades. Unlike the Kennedys with Castro, Carter with Khomeini or Reagan with Gaddafi, Bush had got his man, the first tyrant to bother him -- he ran Noriega to ground in Panama's papal nunciature, tortured him with rock music and hauled him back home for trial. He did not finish off Saddam Hussein, but he kicked...