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Not Bad for a Terrorist Godfather

(Times-UK) Dean Godson - Hojatoleslam Hashemi Ali Akhbar Rafsanjani is the front-runner in Friday's Iranian presidential run-off. This terrorist godfather - once wanted by a German court for his role in authorizing the murder of Iranian dissidents in Berlin - has gone overnight from bad memory to a "pragmatist" and even a "moderate." Western journalists seem too rarely to escape from occidental categories of thought and terminology (interestingly, there is no indigenous word in Farsi for "pragmatist"). In this world of mirror-imaging, they are always on the search for struggles pitting easily identifiable wets versus dries, hardliners versus softliners, and secularists versus theocrats. The West keeps getting it wrong because we underrate the importance of ideology to these regimes. Ideology is often seen as the antonym of pragmatism, even though the two frequently go hand in hand. After all, tyrants such as Milosevic and Stalin were often highly "pragmatic" in their modus operandi - often engaging in tactical retreats to perpetrate even greater evils further down the pike. Curiously, it was left to a senior Foreign Office mandarin at a briefing this week to dampen journalistic high spirits about Iran. British diplomats remember the paroxysms of excitement that greeted Rafsanjani's first election victory in 1989 - and how he failed to live up to expectations of better relations with the West.
2005-06-24 00:00:00
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