Word: understand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Using Khomeini as a cover, extremists of the left are trying to reinforce their position, thereby setting the scene for possible civil war. The Ayatullah Khomeini, old and ailing, does not understand modern statecraft, diplomacy or administration. Jimmy Carter does not know how to deal with him; neither does anybody else. Says a European diplomat: "What can you do when faced with a mad geriatric case?" Yet this remarkable old man, and he alone, seems to possess the power to preserve his volatile country from total anarchy?and to free the rest of the American hostages in Tehran...
...will become a protracted controversy over the events that led to the takeover of the embassy in Tehran-and what the U.S. might have done, if anything, to prevent it. Some experts on Iran in the academic world believe the first mistake of the Carter Administration was failing to understand the basic nature of the movement that swept the Ayatullah Khomeini into power. Following the policies of preceding administrations, Carter originally supported the Shah, seeing him as a stabilizing ally in the Persian Gulf region, and not realizing how widely he was hated by his subjects. Carter first thought...
...more, for not smiling on the good, or frowning on the bad more overtly. In truth, she mostly keeps her feelings protectively compressed behind an almost Conradian irony. Children, servants, old people draw her affection, partly because they are in a better position than the strong or successful to understand the real condition of life: that it is vulnerable to mysterious sudden changes, controlled by powers that the subject does not understand. Imaginative arrangements must be made, all of them temporary. "Gabriel at that time," Gallant writes about a young refugee in France, "still imagined that everyone's life...
...think the seizure is extremely irresponsible and in defiance of all international laws. I don't understand why such a student action can be endorsed by the legitimate government of any nation." Others staunchly defend the embassy seizure. Said an accounting major at Chicago's Roosevelt University...
...told that Americans were honest, loving, good, decent and compassionate. Now the people are blamed for every national ill and scolded as greedy, wasteful and mired in malaise. Which is it? Did we change so much in these three years? Or is it because our present leadership does not understand that we are willing, even anxious, to be on the march again? ... The only thing that paralyzes us today is the myth that we cannot move...