Word: thus
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...fear, I think, comes from the fact that her generation has either witnessed or participated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and thus they are well familiar with the kind of violence and potential collective depression that could sometimes follow massive expressions of dissatisfaction and the quest for change," Pourzand writes...
...ongoing debate inside the Obama Administration. One camp has argued that the Iranian political order could be fundamentally shaken in the days ahead, as in Poland in 1989 and Ukraine in 2004. The other camp, which appears to be the majority view among Obama's principal advisors, has thus far predicted that mass unrest will be crushed, as in the 1968 Prague Spring or the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and it is dangerous to take the side likely to lose; especially since President Obama wants to move quickly to negotiations with the regime over Iran's nuclear program...
...Obama remains noncommittal about when exactly the Administration will make these issues a priority. Even more infuriating to gays is that the White House has thus far refused to publicly criticize the Justice Department's filing last week that defended the Defense of Marriage Act and compared the prohibition of same-sex marriage to the prohibition of incest. While the Justice Department is obligated by tradition to defend current law in court, several gay-rights activists said they found the arguments in the brief insulting. "As an American, a civil-rights advocate and a human being, I hold this Administration...
...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 and the Basij militia - are bastions of support for Ahmadinejad. And they...
...invoking of the specter of an Eastern European-style "velvet revolution" backed by the West - appeared to be generating a narrative that would justify a bloody crackdown, a massive use of military force that would terrify the opposition into submission. Clearly the limited violence unleashed by the Ahmadinejad camp thus far has failed to intimidate Mousavi and his supporters. But while it would almost certainly empty the streets, the "nuclear option" of a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown would be a potentially fatal injury to the regime's sources of legitimacy: its limited but lively democracy and the backing...