[Washington Post] Tara Bahrampour - For the past three decades, the U.S. has been Iran's "Great Satan." Schoolchildren learned to chant "Down With U.S.A." Conservative clerics sermonized against America. Anti-American murals depicting images such as a skull-faced Statue of Liberty dotted Tehran. But since Iran's disputed presidential election last month, another Satan has gained ground: Great Britain. Iran's government has expelled two British diplomats, kicked out the longtime British Broadcasting Corp. bureau chief, and arrested British Embassy staff members, accusing them of fomenting the unrest. Last week, an adviser to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called Britain "worse than America" for its alleged interference in Iran's post-election affairs. Iranians consider the British "the masters of political intrigue, and players such as the U.S. are considered to be novices," said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, director of Middle Eastern studies at Syracuse University. Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, noted that "Ahmadinejad's government has always been very Anglophobic in its approach....They're really obsessed with Britain in a way that even previous Iranian governments, even in the Islamic republic, haven't been." "There were a couple of members of Parliament that got up and said [President Bush's 2002] 'axis of evil' speech was written by the British....They said the Americans weren't capable of this, they weren't intelligent enough to think of this."
2009-07-17 06:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive