on what follows from spreading democracy, the American way:
(...) "Later, I learned how the Americans helped create the SAVAK, trained the Shah's torturers, advised the Shah, and closed their eyes to everything that happened in his political prisons. I was told how young men and women were tortured in these jails and I came to agree with my father; politics was not any of my business.
(...) In college in the early 1970s, some of my classmates would disappear for weeks or months at a time. No one asked why. Everyone knew they had been taken away by the SAVAK. When they returned, we still did not ask questions.Anyone who challenged the government was accused of helping the United States to undermine the Islamic Republic, the cold war with the Great Satan was now a convenient pretext for imprisoning journalists, writers, and student activists – anyone, in fact, who dared to disagree with the reining theocrats. "
(...) "A few days after the interview was published, in a letter to the paper's editor, a group of students wrote, "The Iranian student must watch his back when he walks home alone late at night." Similar threats continued, along with occasional physical harassment. Meanwhile, Iranian students in southern states were reportedly denied service at restaurants and gas stations – "No Gas for Iranians," was a gas-station sign of the times; some were even beaten up."
(...) Four years after Khatami was elected president, a poll administered by Abbas Abdi, one of the student leaders of the hostage-taking, revealed that 75% of Iranians favored dialogue with the American people. Abdi was subsequently jailed. Despite resistance from conservatives, an independent press was emerging; old taboos were being questioned. There were political rallies that not long before would have led directly to jail; there were informal meetings, debates, protests, art exhibits, theater openings, and a burst of other forms of political and artistic expression.
(...) On July 8, 1999 – just as in my youth – a small contingent of students left the housing compound of Tehran University, marching in protest this time against the closure of the reformist newspaper Salam. It was a peaceful demonstration which ended without a confrontation with the authorities as the protesting students returned to their rooms that evening. In the early morning hours of July 9, however, the anti-riot police and plainclothes thugs burst into the housing compound, assaulting sleeping students with chains and batons, even setting rooms on fire. One student was killed; many were injured and taken away to jail.
(...) On July 10, thousands of students and youths gathered at the entrance of Tehran University, chanting slogans against the Supreme Religious Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, shouting "Death to the Dictator" and "Freedom Now."
(...) Many things have changed in Iran since 1999. The reformists have largely been pushed out of the government. The new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the people around him have been working hard to reverse whatever progress was made in the areas of foreign policy and civil liberties during Khatami's presidency.
(...) Is it truly possible that this administration could launch such a war against my childhood home, creating a new, more horrific version of 1953, another half-century-plus of bitterness, another half-century-plus of an Iranian obsession with America?