Word: khomeini
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...crowds pour out of Imam Khomeini Station and into the Square. Already the gathering is huge. Citizens have arrived early, not the customary one to two hours behind schedule, "Iranian time" as its known. The weather has returned to normal this week. It is hot, made worse by the darkness of our clothing. Every day by early evening, however, fat and full clouds dominated the sky, forcing the sun to set through gray and imminent rain...
...Mousavi, on the other hand, inspired little personal adoration. He was known as a tough and effective manager, and a favorite of Ayatullah Khomeini's during the early years of the Islamic republic - especially during the Iran-Iraq war - when he served as Prime Minister. But he had pretty much disappeared from public view for 20 years, living a quiet life as an artist and architect until he re-emerged as a polite prototype of the north Tehran élite. These were people - like the two former Presidents who backed his campaign, Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami - who seemed as concerned...
...continue to dally, Iran's electoral embarrassment will make it easier for Obama to rally other countries behind a tougher sanctions-and-deterrence plan that will further isolate Iran. But that may be exactly what the current regime wants. "Look, for the past 30 years, the Supreme Leader - first Khomeini, now Khamenei - has blamed all our problems on the Great Satan," a prominent conservative told me. "If you take away the Great Satan and we still have problems, how does he explain it? Almost everyone here is in favor of ending this war with America. But no one has less...
...Revolution 2.0? Despite the Twitter-enabled street scenes and revived slogans of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution, a repeat of that successful insurrection remains highly improbable. For one thing, the protest movement is being led by a faction of the Islamic Republic's political establishment, whose members stand to lose a great deal if the regime is brought down and thus have to calibrate their dissent. More important, an unarmed popular movement can topple an authoritarian regime only if the security forces switch sides or stay neutral. But Iran's key security forces - the élite Revolutionary Guards Corps...
...When Mousavi was Prime Minister, he oversaw an office that ran operatives abroad, from Lebanon to Kuwait to Iraq. This was the heyday of Khomeini's theocratic vision, when Iran thought it really could export its revolution across the Middle East, providing money and arms to anyone who claimed he could upend the old order. Mousavi was not only swept up into this delusion but also actively pursued...