20th-century-in-iran

"Conspiracies have been discovered , we cannot tolerate what unjust things they are doing. Time is passed."

"The enemy has narrated the story of taking over the den of espionage because you unfortunately have not."

"There is a special right for women through Islam, dear students deliver black people and women to Minister of Foreign relations."

"Documents of den of espionage are available through Shad app for students."

"In practice, opposition by the new Iranian regime to the Americans did not necessarily extend to support for the Soviet Union. Two days after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet envoy in Iran promised Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution and Guardian of the Islamic Republic, assistance in any conflict with the USA; only to be told that there could be no mutual understanding between a Muslim nation and a non-Muslim government. Nevertheless, as a result of American backing for the Shah and for Israel (with whom the Shah had co-operated), and its identification with liberalism and consumerism, Khomeini saw America as ‘the Great Satan’. He instigated the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran by student radicals on 4 November 1979, an act that created a hostage crisis lasting until 20 January 1981. This crisis, and the failed American attempt to rescue the hostages in April 1980, discredited Carter and helped Khomeini sustain a highly-charged atmosphere in Iran. It was clear that America’s loss of a strategic partner had altered the Cold War even if Iran had not joined the Soviet Union, which Khomeini described as ‘the other Great Satan’. Thus, there was no equivalent for the Soviet Union to the now-closer relations between the USA and both China and Egypt."

"UK embassy is den of espionage 2."

"Iran US relations challenge wasn't begun with this crisis , it was oil issue."

"Special envoy meeting with me is not possible."

"US Embassy had broken the Vienna convention."

"In September 1980, Iraq went to war with Iran. Saddam's ostensible aim was to capture the Shatt al-Arab waterway that separates the two countries, but in reality he wanted to secure the Iranian oilfields and strike a blow against Iran’s Islamic revolution which threatened to seduce his own Shia minority. After some initial successes, the Iraqi army was pushed back. Saddam’s forces seemed on the verge of collapse until the US provided Iraq with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop manoeuvres, allowing Saddam to deploy his aircraft with greater effect."

"Europe came to the forefront in the early 1980s in part because the opportunistic and unsuccessful attack of Saddam Hussein of Iraq on Iran in 1980 began a major war that lasted until 1988. This conflict continued after the Iraqi forces were driven out of Iran in 1982. The decision was taken by the Iranians to invade Iraq in an attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein. This commitment ensured that Iran seemed a far less serious threat to America’s allies in the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia. During the war, the West provided indirect support to Iraq, not least by sending warships to protect tanker traffic in the Gulf from Iranian attack. This deployment led to clashes between American and Iranian forces, clashes in which the latter were defeated. Although largely armed by the Soviet Union, Iraq was also provided with Western weaponry. However, in contrast to the situation from 1990, South-West Asia in the 1980s required only a relatively modest outlay of American resources, which ensured that attention could be devoted elsewhere."

"The most important departure from determinism during the Cold War had to do, obviously, with hot wars. Prior to 1945, great powers fought great wars so frequently that they seemed to be permanent features of the international landscape: Lenin even relied on them to provide the mechanism by which capitalism would self-destruct. After 1945, however, wars were limited to those between superpowers and smaller powers, as in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, or to wars among smaller powers like the four Israel and its Arab neighbors fought between 1948 and 1973, or the three India-Pakistan wars of 1947-48, 1965, and 1971, or the long, bloody, and indecisive struggle that consumed Iran and Iraq throughout the 1980s."

"The tension between these conflicting aims is perhaps particularly acute in the late twentieth century because of the publicity given to the existence of various alternative “models” for emulation. On the one hand, there are the extremely successful “trading states”—chiefly in Asia, like Japan and Hong Kong, but also including Switzerland, Sweden, and Austria—which have taken advantage of the great growth in world production and in commercial interdependence since 1945, and whose external policy emphasizes peaceful, trading relations with other societies. In consequence, they have all sought to keep defense spending as low as is compatible with the preservation of national sovereignty, thereby freeing resources for high domestic consumption and capital investment. On the other hand, there are the various “militarized” economies—Vietnam in Southeast Asia, Iran and Iraq as they engage in their lengthy war, Israel and its jealous neighbors in the Near East, and the USSR itself—all of which allocate more (in some cases, much more) than 10 percent of their GNP to defense expenditures each year and, while firmly believing that such levels of spending are necessary to guarantee military security, manifestly suffer from that diversion of resources from productive, peaceful ends. Between the two poles of the merchant and the warrior states, so to speak, there lie most of the rest of the nations of this planet, not convinced that the world is a safe enough place to allow them to reduce arms expenditure to Japan’s unusually low level, but also generally uneasy at the high economic and social costs of large-scale spending upon armaments, and aware that there is a certain trade-off between short-term military security and long-term economic security."

"A curious military force of professional soldiers, mullahs, neighborhood militiamen and schoolboys as young as 13, linked by an intense Islamic fervor, broke the long deadlock in the Persian Gulf war by routing entrenched Iraqi troops."

"Why should we hate the people we once loved because of a war that mars even our memories?"

"The need to escape, whether from poverty or punishment, can force people into the military, while others are encouraged and sustained even in combat by their own cultures. Values and ideologies, including religion and nationalism, motivate individuals just as they do nations. Religions promise immortality or rewards in the afterlife for those who die in battle. Thousands of Iranian volunteers marched across mine-strewn battlefields in the long war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, believing that they would go directly to heaven when they died because the ayatollahs had told them so. Some carried keys they had been given which were supposed to speed their entry."

"Certain aspects of the Iran-Iraq conflict — including trench warfare, barbed-wire fences and soldiers attacking machine-gun emplacements across open ground — echoed the fighting of the First World War. But there were some sinister innovations, such as Iran’s sending of human waves of young boys — who were told that they would become ‘martyrs’ if they were killed - across minefields. No less horrific was Saddam’s profligate use of chemical weapons against the advancing Iranian troops. The conflict settled into a war of attrition. By the time a ceasefire was agreed, in July 1988, both sides were effectively back where they had begun — with over a million lives lost."

"A situation in Asia that was not without considerable promise for the USA was to become far more threatening in 1979. The overthrow, in the face of mass-demonstrations, of the Shah of Iran, who left Tehran on 16 January 1979, and his replacement by a theocratic state hostile to the USA, combined with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979 to create a highly volatile situation that posed problems for analysts. There was the prospect, first, that the USA might lose the struggle for regional hegemony and, secondly, that this might have wider consequences across Asia. Although authoritarian and prone to initiatives that were not always welcome, Iran was America’s leading ally in South Asia, an opponent to Arab radicalism, and a block to Soviet expansionism and that of Iraq, a key Soviet ally. The USA had used Iran to support the Kurds against Iraq, and, in 1973, to send troops to help the Sultan of Oman overcome left-wing rebels based in the region of Dhofar, rebels backed by Communist powers. Iran was also a major purchaser of American arms, and a key oil exporter. Under the Shah, it had long played a central role in the forward containment of the Soviet Union, not least by providing important radar bases to screen the southern Soviet Union. After the collapse of Iran, the Americans fell back upon Israel."

"I admit that I called it wrong really from the beginning and in the direction that it went. The direction that it went -- this rather harsh and brutal and intolerant direction that it went -- certainly surprised me. I didn't expect it. Nor did I expect that we and the Iranians would remain estranged for as long as we have."

"Global arrogance, is not satisfied with the Islamic Revolution's success because it is quite aware of the fact that our victory would result in the globalization of Islam."

"Animosity toward the shah and the intensification of Iranian nationalism, aroused by the perception of the shah’s regime as an instrument of foreign imperialism and moral corruption, united otherwise incompatible groups into a powerful revolutionary alliance. In the course of one year, 1978, the monarchy was swept away. Among the contending revolutionary forces, religious leaders possessed a greater cultural affinity with Iran’s masses and better access to extensive social networks for mobilizing large numbers of people than any other component of the anti-shah coalition. The result was a startling innovation in the history of world governments—the creation of the Islamic Republic."

"There is an irony lodged deep in the heart of the revolution that turned Iran from a Persian kingdom into an Islamic theocracy, a revolution cheered and organized by secular leftists and Islamist modernists. The irony is that the Iran of the fundamentalist ayatollahs owes its ultimate birth pang to cities of sin and freedom: Beirut, capital of Arabic modernity, once known as the Paris of the Middle East; and Paris, birthplace of the Age of Enlightenment. If not for the permissive freedoms in both, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—a patient man with a cunning mind—might have died forgotten in a two-story mudbrick house down a narrow cul-de-sac in the holy city of Najaf, in Iraq. The Iranian cleric had agitated against the shah of Iran for over a decade and spent time in prison in Tehran. He was sent into exile and arrived in Najaf in 1965, where he languished in anonymity for thirteen years, popular among his circle of disciples but shunned by most of the Iraqi Shia clergy. In Najaf, clerics stayed out of politics and disapproved of the firebrand ayatollah who thought he had a special relationship with God. Outside the cities that busied themselves with theology, there were those who saw in Khomeini a useful political tool, someone who could rouse crowds in the battle against oppression. Different people with different dreams, from Tehran to Jerusalem, from Paris to Beirut, looked to Khomeini and saw a man who could serve their agenda, not realizing they were serving his."