Word: iranianized
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...those of us who lived through the Iranian revolution, which toppled the government of the Shah and paved the way for the creation of the Islamic republic in 1979, there is a dreamlike familiarity to the massive riots roiling the streets of Tehran. I remember the seemingly spontaneous rallies that brought the country to a screeching halt. The young, fearless protesters daring the security forces to make them martyrs in the cause of freedom. The late-night call-and-response of Allahu akbar (God is great!) echoing from rooftop to rooftop. The strange confederacies between young students and elderly clerics...
...simplistic paradigms of "reformist vs. conservative," "secularists vs. theocrats," "young vs. old" that have colored so much of the Western media's perception of Iranian politics no longer apply. The unrest now taking place in Iran is about far more than a stolen election. It is about the future of the Islamic Republic of Iran. ("10 Days in Tehran: What I Saw at the Iranian Revolution...
...heard some in the media compare the events in Iran with the "Tehran spring" of 1999, when hundreds of thousands of young Iranians, buoyed by the reformist policies of then President Khatami, poured onto the streets to demand greater freedoms, only to be brutally beaten back by the country's security forces. Others point to 1989 and the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing for a suitable historical analogy for the antigovernment demonstrations that have rocked Iran. Yet for me and millions of my fellow compatriots - both inside and outside Iran - it is the memory of 1979 that most keenly informs...
...None of this is to exonerate the other candidates. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Iranian paramilitary force responsible for most of the terrorism against the U.S. Conservative Mohsen Rezaei was the Guards' commander. And Mehdi Karroubi, like Mousavi, was deeply involved in Lebanon in the '80s. According to my Hizballah contact, he too was a patron of Mughniyah...
...Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower