Iran

Flag of The Islamic Republic of Iran

Iran, officially The Islamic Republic of Iran (جمهوری اسلامی ايران) is a theocratic country in southwest Asia. Its capital is Tehran and its official language is Persian, or Farsi.

History

Iran was formerly known as Persia, and was the historical centre of a number of empires.

During World War II Iran was openly partial to the Axis cause. A joint Anglo-Soviet military action began on 25 August 1941 when 40,000 Soviet troops entered Iran from the north and headed for Tehran. On the same day about 19,000 British Commonwealth troops, mostly in Indian brigades, entered from various directions. There was slight resistance on the part of Iranian troops but no force Iran could not have withstood the power of the occupying armies of British Empire and the Soviet Union, and German assistance by air was now as far away as Crete. On 30 August 1941 identical notes were submitted by the invading powers to the Iranian Government which accepted their terms on 9 September. On 16 September the Shah abdicated in favor of his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, and left the country. The next day Tehran was jointly occupied by the British and Soviet troops without show of military force.

The terms imposed by Tri-Partite Treaty of alliance signed on 29 January 1942 disavowed any designs against the territorial integrity of Iran or independence. Iran agreed to refrain from any act contrary to British or Soviet interests.

After the CIA-backed coup of 1953, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown and the Shah returned to power. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini emerged as an active critic of the Shah's increasingly autocratic government during this period. Khomeini was imprisoned and later exiled, but popular anti-government sentiment continued to spread. In 1979, the Shah fled Iran as Khomeini returned from exile. The Shah's troops were defeated by the rebels and in the following year, the Islamic Republic was established following a national referendum.

On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students entered the US embassy and took a number of American personnel hostage, citing the overthrowing of Mossadegh in 1953 and accusing the embassy staff of preparing another coup against the revolutionary government. Some of the hostages, including women, African Americans and an employee diagnosed with mutliple sclerosis, were quickly released. Others were held for 444 days before being allowed to leave Iran and return to the United States.

In the 1980s America was revelations of the Iran-Contra affair, were uncovered. Large volumes of documents relating to the matter were lost or withheld from investigators. The affair is still shrouded with secrecy and it is very hard to discover the facts. It involved several members of the Reagan Administration who in 1986 helped sell arms to Iran through Israel, and used the proceeds to fund the Contras, an anti-communist guerrilla organization in Nicaragua.

Iran desired the weapons in order to fight Iraq, which had invaded the majority Arab Khuzestan province in southwestern Iran in September 1980. The ensuing Iran-Iraq War lasted until 1988, when some naval operations by the United States against Iran impressed the impossibility of their position upon the Iranian leadership. Iran finally signed an armistice which ceded to Iraq the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the latter country's main war aim. Less than three years later, Iraq ceded it back to guarantee Iranian neutrality in the Gulf War against the United States.

After the war, Iran continued to support Hezbollah, the most powerful Shiite militia in Lebanon, which had waged war against the United States during the latter's intervention to end the 1982 Israeli invasion. With Iran's assistance, Hezbollah launched terrorist attacks even against such clearly inoffensive countries as Argentina, which seems to have been attacked because there were Jews there. The head of Iranian intelligence during the early 1990's, Ali Fallahian, was indicted along with various Hezbollah operatives and an international arrest warrant was issued for him in March 2007, which the Iranians immediately appealed. This and the Iranian role in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing prevented any normalization of relations, even after Mohammed Khatami became President of Iran in 1997 and made this one of the principal goals of his administration.

Khatami was seen by some in the West as a possible Iranian version of Mikhail Gorbachev. Great Britain reestablished relations with Iran in 1999. His coalition was dominated by persons who clearly wished to make Iran a normal country. However, the limitations of the President in the Iranian system allowed Iranian conservatives to marginalize his supporters and close media outlets friendly to his policies. Although he won reelection in 2001 and cooperated with the United States to some extent against their mutual enemy the Taliban, his supporters were not able to take the next logical step that Boris Yeltsin and other anti-communist Russians did under Gorbachev, that is, unite to completely replace the existing political system. Because they had been able to outmaneuver him politically, Iranian conservatives also did not oblige with a corresponding coup d'etat against Khatami. Normal relations with the United States probably will require just this sort of replacement of the existing Iranian constitution, but the popularity of Khatami and congruent popular distaste for his successor indicates that may be possible without war.

Current Status

Iran is currently ruled by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the second theocrat of the country, who has been in office since the death of Khomenei in 1989. He is considered to have a less extreme anti-Western bias than his predecessor. It is governed on a day-to-day basis by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is suspected by several Western nations to be developing nuclear weapons to use against Israel. Domestically, however, he is facing questioning and possible impeachment by the Iranian Parliament, who see him as too extreme. The relationship between these two could be compared to that between the king and the prime minister in a constitutional monarchy, although students of Iranian politics hotly debate where the precise balance of power lies.

The Iranian constitution calls for a Presidential election once every four years (in practice, the year following Presidential elections in the United States). Candidates are selected by the Guardian Council, an unelected clerical body. Presidents are limited to two terms as in the United States. While since 1981 no Iranian President has been defeated for reelection, elections lacking an incumbent have been quite lively, as was the 2005 election, which Ahmadinejad only won at the runoff stage.

Tensions between Iran and the United States have increased since Iran was identified by President Bush in January 2002 as part of the Axis of Evil, and particularly since the 2005 election of Ahmadinejad. An attempt by the European Union to negotiate a surrender of or reduction in Iranian nuclear efforts failed, leading to the United Nations Security Council voting to impose limited sanctions. The United States has since lobbied for sanctions more along the lines of those imposed on 1990 upon Iraq, which remained in place until the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Talks in March 2007 between U. S., Iranian, and Syrian diplomats at a regional conference organized by Iraq proved unproductive, although the willingness of the parties to talk was itself regarded by some as a sign that war had become somewhat less likely.

In spite of the relative overstretch of the U. S. military, the utility of an attack on Iran, or at least its nuclear facilities, was a live debate among American opinion leaders throughout 2006. Objections to such an attack were mostly based upon the belief that this would represent the first step on a slippery slope to occupation of Iran, which would probably require conscription in the United States, a step conservatives and most military leaders oppose. The debate, however, appeared to have been won decisively by the hawks following the regime's suicidal decision in late March 2007 not to promptly release 15 British sailors and marines it had captured on March 23, 2007.

The April 2007 attack on Iran was anything but a surprise. Websites and print media throughout the world, mostly of leftist orientation, trumpeted the imminent outbreak of war, with some even specifying that it would commence before dawn Iranian time on April 6, 2007. Wikipedia had reported as early as January 20, 2007 that the attack would come in April (quoting the Arab Times, which reported it on January 18), and that this month was chosen because British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be leaving office that summer, or even as early as May. Ahmedinejad may also have chosen this time to seize British servicemembers in the hope that Blair would, over years or decades, evolve into another critic of Western and Israeli policy in the Middle East.^{[Citation Needed]} (See Iran Hostage Crisis.)

External links

• Official website of the President of Iran
• The blog of the President of Iran