Khomeini and Jamaleddine on the ME and democracy
Perhaps Zonder will allow that these two prominent Shiite clerics know a little something about the ME.
Mr. Khomeini told me he had left the Iranian spiritual center of Qum to meet with scholars in the Iraqi Shiite spiritual centers of Karbala and Najaf. He, too, is a progressive, he explained, and he intends to use the freedom that the U.S. invasion has created in Iraq to press for real democratic reform in Iran.
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"The neighboring countries are all tyrannical countries and they are wary of a modern, liberal Iraq. . . . That is why they work to foil the U.S. presence. . . . If the U.S. wants to help Iraqis, it must help them the way it helped Germany and Japan, because to help Iraq is really to help 1.3 billion Muslims. Iraq will teach these values to the entire Islamic world. Because Iraq has both Sunnis and Shiites, and it has Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. . . . If it succeeds here it can succeed elsewhere. But to succeed you also need to satisfy people's basic needs: jobs and electricity. If people are hungry, they will be easily recruited by the extremists. If they are well fed and employed, they will be receptive to good ideas. . . . The failure of this experiment in Iraq would mean success for all despots in the Arab and Islamic world. [That is why] this is a challenge that America must accept and take all the way."
nytimes.com |
