(Funny - I found this article while surfing through a chain of blog links, but it's from a local newspaper from where I grew up.)
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-10/105997525225580.xml
Kin of Khomeini turns to U.S. for military help in freeing Iran
Late cleric's grandson praises America for liberating Iraq and relieving people's suffering
Monday, August 04, 2003
BY BORZOU DARAGAHI SPECIAL TO THE STAR-LEDGER
Baghdad, Iraq -- The grandson of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fiery cleric who launched an anti-American Islamic revolution in Iran that sparked 25 years of unrest in the Gulf region, yesterday condemned Iran's clerical regime and suggested United States military intervention in Iran as a possible path to liberation for his country.
"In Iran, the people really need freedom and freedom must come about. Freedom is more important than bread," said Hussein Khomeini.
The 45-year-old cleric said that "if there's no way for freedom in Iran other than American intervention, I think the people would accept that. I would accept it, too, because it's in accord with my faith."
The young Khomeini -- here ostensibly on a religious pilgrimage to Shi'a holy sites in Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad -- praised the U.S. takeover of Iraq.
"I see day-by-day that (Iraq) is on the path to improvement," he said. "I see that there's security, that the people are happy, that they've been released from suffering."
The United States has accused the clerical regime in Tehran of harboring terrorists, trying to build nuclear weapons and oppressing its own people. Conservatives in Washington have called for the ouster of the Iranian leadership following American military successes in Afghanistan and Iran.
The United States has a long, tangled history with Iran that precedes the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Back then, followers of the young Khomeini's grandfather stormed the American embassy and kept employees hostage for more than a year.
These days, the United States accuses Iran of attempting to subvert post-war Iraq by allowing militants to enter the country, broadcasting destabilizing propaganda and using its pull with Shi'a clerics to rouse the Iraqi populace.
The newly established Iraqi governing council already has begun meeting with representatives from Tehran. Iranian deputy foreign minister Hussein Sadeghi visited Iraq several days ago, meeting with Iraqi officials, said Adnan Pachachi, Iraq's former foreign minister and a leading member of the nation's 25-member governing council. "We discussed all aspects of relations between the two countries," Pachachi said.
Hussein Khomeini crossed the Iranian border into occupied Iraq about a month ago in a visit rife with irony.
Iran and Iraq have been regional rivals for decades. Iraq harbored Ayatollah Khomeini after the Shah of Iran kicked him out of the country. During his exile in the Iraqi city of Najaf , Khomeini's grandfather, a high-level cleric, masterminded a revolution that ousted the Shah of Iran and established the world's first modern-day theocracy.
Iran and Iraq fought a brutal war from 1980 to 1988 that left 1 million dead and strained relations between the two countries. Nearly 25 years later, the grandson has returned to the country where he resided from 1963 to 1978 and begun speaking out against the legacy of that revolution.
A longtime reformist silenced and shut out of Iran's conservative inner circle of power, Khomeini confined his critiques of the Islamic Republic to scholarly rather than political arguments. He said a religious government can only come once the 12th Shi'a prophet Mahdi -- who disappeared in the 9th century -- returns.
The young Khomeini argues for the separation of religion and state and criticized "velayet-e-faqih" -- the religious doctrine mandating Iranian Shi'a clerics as God's representative on earth and giving them near-absolute power
Although he says he has yet to meet with any American officials, Khomeini's positions might lift the spirits of U.S. officials in Iraq struggling to win the hearts and minds of Iraqi Shi'as, who make up 60 percent of the population.
He condemned Saddam Hussein's regime and criticized those countries opposed to the war against Iraq's Ba'athist government as ignorant of the conditions under which Iraqis were suffering.
"The people here were subject to crimes unprecedented in world history," he said.
He said nationalism has no basis in religious doctrine, and freedom was more important than independence from foreign rule. "Freedom is a basic right. It supersedes all," he said.
Iran's conservative clerics have used their stranglehold over Islamic doctrine to impose medieval conditions on Iranians, forcing women to cover their heads and punishing dissidents for heresy.
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