Negotiating with Ourselves

THE WEEKLY STANDARD

BY REUEL MARC GERECHT

Analyzing the Islamic Republic isn’t a guessing game—at least it shouldn’t be. Iranian Islamists’ words and deeds are pretty consistent. Memoirs, speeches, and biographies have poured forth from those who made and sustain the regime. The New York Times and Senator Edward Kennedy may have called Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini an “enigma” and “the George Washington” of his country, respectively, but that was surely because no one at the newspaper or in the senator’s office had read the lectures that the mullah gave in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq, in 1970. To be fair to the Times and Kennedy, most scholars, spooks, intelligence analysts, and foreign-service officers hadn’t paid much attention to the clerics, either. They were too primitive for the secular set. 

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