Word: khomeini
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...perspective of nearly 2 1/2 decades, the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran and its monumental impact across the Islamic world may appear to have been inevitable. It seemed like anything but certain destiny, however, to those of us on board the Air France 747 taking Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini from Paris to Tehran that morning in 1979. The exiled Shah's Prime Minister, Shahpour Bakhtiar, still controlled the country and commanded the armed forces, and our immediate concern was whether the air force might decide that the best way to solve the problem of what to do with...
...would take eight tumultuous days before Khomeini could wrest power from Bakhtiar, but already in his arrival speech he abandoned earlier hints of willingness to share power and demanded that the Prime Minister get out. Tipped off that the military was going to arrest him, Khomeini broadcast an appeal that brought tens of thousands of Iranians into the streets. Stores of weapons in the mosques were flowing into the hands of Khomeini loyalists, and a bloody civil war appeared almost certain...
That November, radical supporters seized the American embassy, provoking a 444-day confrontation with the "Great Satan" over 52 hostages. But Khomeini never was able to reconcile the widely divergent forces in his revolution. Top aides fled into exile or were executed, and thousands of other Iranians were imprisoned or killed. Iran became a deeply divided country and remains so today. Despite this, to Khomeini's neighbors in the Arab world the Ayatullah's revolution serves as a historical beacon...
...look at what happened after the Ayatullah Khomeini seized power in Iran in 1979 and raised the specter of a radical, anti-American Islamic nation with messianic impulses for the region. Over the next decade two Presidents, anxious for a counterforce to Iran's fundamentalist ambitions, gave diplomatic, financial and military assistance to the secular, "modernist" regime of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. By 1990, with Saddam in Kuwait and threatening the Saudis, the U.S. realized the error of its ways and dispatched half a million troops to help free Kuwait from the grip of its neighbor Iraq. Surely, we assumed...
...golden opportunity. No military expert, yet commander in chief, he thought a quick strike by his superior forces could snatch back some disputed territory from Iran and earn gratitude from Arab regimes for slaying the Persian fundamentalist Shi'ite threat. But his army failed to break Ayatullah Khomeini's revolutionary forces for eight years. Whenever they threatened to conquer pieces of his territory, he shelled them with lethal chemicals, setting a pattern of resorting to extreme measures anytime his survival seemed imperiled. When Khomeini's death finally let Saddam have a cease-fire in 1988, he declared it a great...