Iranian President - 1979 Hostage Taker?

[GePap]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


How is it irrelevent that the new head of state participated in taking our own embassy hostage?

I never head Khameini was there.

(The president of Iran is the head of Government. NOT the head of state. That's the Ayahtollah.)

[DarkCloud]

Yes, it bears clarification that in nations other than the United States, many presidents have only limited powers.

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Indeed- Khotami, the former President of Iran was a reformer who had many of his reforms blasted down by the council of Guardians lead by Khameini.

The President Role has traditionally been merely to 'sign off' on the Guardian's agenda.

Those at the Theological capital at Qom have more power than the Administrative capital at Tehran ever could.

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And once again, just because someone is a 'very bad man' hasn't stopped the US from dealing with them in the past. Heck, the US 'deals' with Kim Jong Il (sort of), many African and South American dictators (from Agosto Pinochet to Hugo Chavez) and beyond. Diplomacy is a pragmatic art.

If the US wants to invade Iran- then okay, let it go ahead and do so- but in doing so it'll create just as bloody a problem as was created during the 1979 Islamic Revolution... with nearly as many atrocities. There's no doubt that it'll fare worse than Iraq- if only because the Moslem world will feel doubly threatened and that the Iranians are highly nationalistic, and that the theological rulers actually bear a fairly strong group of support that Saddam lacked... and the fact that the nation is **%*ing huge.

[DarkCloud]

Here's an interesting alternative way to look at the situation... Not necessarily the way that I look at it, but I'm just throwing this out there:

Iran's Fervor Fades for Embassy Takeover
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer


TEHRAN, Iran -- For Iranians, fervor over the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover -- a central event in their stormy Islamic Revolution -- has faded. If the country's new president participated, he'd be one of many former hostage-takers who entered politics.

Many of the organizers of the embassy seizure are now leading advocates of democratic reform and closer ties with the United States.

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In fact, the election of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seals the end of an era in which former hostage-takers held key positions in the government and parliament. Most of them have already lost their posts in the backlash by Iran's clerical regime or will leave with the outgoing pro-reform president.

The official Iranian media were silent Friday about demands by President Bush on Thursday that the new president explain his role in the embassy seizure. Six former hostages, after seeing Ahmadinejad in photos or on television, said they believe he was among the hostage-takers. One American said Ahmadinejad helped interrogate him.

The state news agency, radio and television made no mention of Bush's comments. Iranian newspapers do not publish on Fridays, a weekend day in Iran. Ahmadinejad's aides have denied he had a role.

The students who carried out the embassy takeover said Ahmadinejad didn't participate in the taking or holding of 52 American hostages for 444 days.

If he had been involved, Ahmadinejad likely would have played it up in his presidential campaign to increase his appeal to hard-liners, the only ones who might still be impressed, said Abbas Abdi, one of the student leaders.

"If he had played any sort of role in any part of it, he would have used that 1,000 times in the past 25 years to take advantage of it," Abdi told The Associated Press on Friday.

While a traumatic event for Americans, the embassy seizure and the revolution that surrounded it were, for Iranians, similar to the 1960s in the U.S. and Europe: a turbulent period that forged today's leaders.

And like many post-Baby Boomers in the United States, sick of hearing about the 1960s, many young Iranians have little interest in the capture of the "Den of Spies," as the revolutionaries called the U.S. Embassy.

"I was a little kid when the embassy seizure happened," said Reza Hosseinpour, a Tehran shopkeeper in his late 20s. "I don't want to hear about it anymore. It's part of the past history. There has been enough hostility between Iran and America."

In past years, the annual celebrations to mark the Nov. 4, 1979 seizure of the embassy have attracted crowds only in the hundreds -- many of them children bused in for the event.

The students that carried out the takeover were vehement supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shiite theologian who became Iran's supreme leader and imposed an Islamic government. The students seized the embassy to protest the U.S. refusal to hand over Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Iranian leader who had been ousted from power that year.

Over the past decade, many of the students formed the core of the Iranian reform movement that sought the loosening of the theocracy's hold on power and contacts with the United States.

Many, like Abdi, are members of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, the largest reformist party, which helped bring outgoing pro-reform president Mohammad Khatami to power in 1997.

Khatami's brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, was also a hostage-taker, but now leads the party and was vice speaker of parliament after his brother took office.

Abdi was jailed in November 2002 after conducting a poll showing strong public support for dialogue with the United States. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, but freed in May after the Supreme Court overturned his conviction.

At least two former hostage-takers will be leaving office with Khatami's government: Energy Minister Habibollah Bitaraf and Vice President Masoumeh Ebtekar, the highest woman in the Iranian leadership.

Ebtekar was the 19-year-old spokeswoman for the students who seized the embassy.

Known sarcastically among the American captives as "Sister Mary," she learned English as a child in Philadelphia and became a fixture on American television where on an almost nightly basis she vigorously defended the takeover and the Iranian Revolution.

Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leader of the students who swept into the embassy, was a lawmaker during the Khatami era and played a key role in the reform agenda -- although laws passed by parliament were mostly vetoed by the Guardian Council, an unelected oversight body dominated by hard-liners, including allies of Ahmadinejad.

Like many other reformists, Mirdamadi was barred by the Guardian Council from running for re-election last year.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-iran-embassy-memories,1,5884890.story?

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by GePap
I never head Khameini was there.

(The president of Iran is the head of Government. NOT the head of state. That's the Ayahtollah.)

OMFG teh pwnage!!!!! or not...

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by GePap
Yup, just look at what was done to the Iriquois confederacy by other revolutionaries, or to those Colonists who remained loyal to the crown.

Did your presidents engage in such ruthless behaviour, or only the rank and file people?

That this guy could have such a large majority despite this past shows that there is something very rotten in the Iranian electorate.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Spiffor
Did your presidents engage in such ruthless behaviour, or only the rank and file people?

That this guy could have such a large majority despite this past shows that there is something very rotten in the Iranian electorate.

Well I know that George Washington, while a British colonial participated in Indian massacres in the Ohio River Valley.

[Spiffor]

He was a scumbag then

[Imran Siddiqui]

Ah yes, imposing today's morality on the past so you can seem all high and mighty and moral.

[Spiffor]

No, it was merely a cheap shot at your greatest hero (the genocidial one)

[Imran Siddiqui]

That's ok... he's better than any Frenchman who's come down the pike .

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Spiffor
No, it was merely a cheap shot at your greatest hero (the genocidial one)

Greatest? Didn't you hear? According to AOL, Reagan's our greatest hero! [Insert 200+ rolling eyes smilies here]

[GePap]

Originally posted by Spiffor

Did your presidents engage in such ruthless behaviour, or only the rank and file people?

That this guy could have such a large majority despite this past shows that there is something very rotten in the Iranian electorate.

I am sorry, but I am of the "I don;t give a **** about personal pasts" school of looking at leaders.

I don;t care if someone in their past killed a hundred nuns and ate their flesh and used their skin as boots and used their skulls as place settings: to me that is not a valid reason in and of itself to change policy towards another state.

But in the realm of "bad things to do", having participated in the hostage crisis is definitelly a miniscule infracture. As was stated above, keeping people prisoners for a year and a few months is not a nice thing, but it is not an "evil" things either, not by any stretch. Had they been beaten, tortured, raped, whatever, those actions would be evil, but imprisonment with relatively mild behavior? I don;t think putting people in prison is evil, so why should I give a damn about the hostage crisis as it played out?

[Drake Tungsten]

He's a brutal ****. Not because of what he may or may not have done wrt to the Embassy. That's practically irrelevent.

My feelings exactly.

[MrFun]

You're a Republican Drake -- you don't have feelings.

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
The American people elected the Bush Administration, however, and gave him a Republican majority in both houses.

Okay how about Red State People then.



damn lawyers