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Event Detail
Morningside Heights
International Affairs Building, Room 1501
The Middle East Institute (MEI) and SIPA present the first lecture in the spring 2008 series Three decades of the Islamic Republic of Iran: "Regime Change and the U.S. Agenda for Iran"
The Islamic Republic of Iran imprisoned for months a 67-year-old Iranian-American scholar (Haleh Esfandiari) on charges she was organizing a "velvet revolution" like that which brought down the communist Czech government an all too typical paranoia by a regime scared that its people are more attracted to Western culture than to its revolutionary message.
Add to that the regime's inability to bring Iranians the prosperity they expect, and the result is a system which increasingly relies on repression done by the small minority of true believers, many of them veterans of the Iran-Iraq war.
About the speaker:
Patrick Clawson is Deputy Director for Research of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has written or edited twenty-five books and monographs, mostly about Middle Eastern politics, especially Iran. The most recent include Deterring the Ayatollahs: Complications in Applying Cold War Strategy to Iran and Forcing Hard Choices on Tehran: Raising the Costs of Iran's Nuclear Program (both The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, with Michael Eisenstadt), and Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave, with Michael Rubin). His previous positions include senior economist at the National Defense University, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. He is senior editor of Middle East Quarterly. He speaks Persian (Farsi) and French.
