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Topical Articles
A Survey of the War
Editorial Board
The article starts with a brief survey of the historical backdrop to the Iran-Iraq disputes, followed by an overview of the Iraqi invasion. The initial gains of the invasion were well below Iraqi expectations. During the next phase of the conflict, Iran organized its forces to ecpel the agressors, which ultimately led to the successful liberation of the port city of Khorramshahr. The subsequent sections deal with the long war of attrition that followed, punctuated by limited gains, such as the iranian occupation of the Fao Peninsula. The final sections deals with the eight and find year of the war and its unexpected consequences.
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Historiography of the War
Kaveh Bayat
This article deals with some aspects of the growing and expanding efforts at documenting the history of War since its conclusion. These efforts have been mainly concentrated on two institutions: "The Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) War Research center" and the "Center for Documentation of the Military History of the Army". Compared with the general pattern of contemporary historiography in Iran these efforts have had some striking achievements in their own fields of interest. Nevertheless, they have also encountered several hurdles, some of which are discussed in this article.
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Revolution, War and the Turnover of the Elites
Morad Saghafi
Shortly after the victory of the revolution, the policy of radically replacing the existing elite replaced the peaceful and legal approach to this issue. The main reason for this change of attitude was the revolutionary group's ideological approach to the remnants of the Shah's army as well as the activities of armed political groups. The war against the external enemy only followed this trend.
It was only after the end of the war and the changes in the government general politics, and the serious reconsideration of foreign policy that the opportunity to once again critically analyze the social and political approach to the elites turnover policy has presented itself.
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Military Music
Seyed Alireza Mir Ali Naghi
While the Revolution produced a plethora of revolutionary music and marches, the War did not find a similar expression. This article analyzes this absence of a musical expression of the War experience by pointing the factors such as the geographic limits of a direct experience of the war, which remained confined to the West and South of the country, together with an ongoing disagreement about the legitimacy and permissibility of music in general in Islamic Iran.
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The Manufacturing of a Herd; Iraq's Road of Militarization
Isam Al-Khafaji
Contemporary Iraq has been characterized by the increasing militarization of society, while the military itself has been prevented access to governmenral power. Following a brief survey of Iraq's political history since mid-century, and taking into consideration economic developments and demographic movements in the country, the author discusses how the Ba'ath Party has used war as a means of expanding its sphere of power both in the region and within the country itself.
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General Articles
The Throey of the "Clash of Civilization" Revised: An interview with Samuel Huntington
Ramin Jaghanbeglou
Reviewing the factors that led to this formulating his theory of the "Clash of Civilisation", Huntington claims in this interview that his theory should not be taken as a forecast but as a warning, which should be heeded in order for us to be able to prevent the formulation of this potential outcome.
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Dialogue; a New Literary Genre in the Political Discourse of the Constitutional Revolution 1906-0911
Touraj Atabaki
Although "Dialogue" was not a completely unknown genere in the Iranian political literary cultural traditions nevertheless compared to its European counterparts, this gener never went beyond a mere conversial between a master and his disciple. It was only during Constitutional Revelution that "Dialogue" was gradually promoted to a new and serious level, where the aim was a mutual effort to discover truth, rather than its single sided propaganda.
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Taste of Cherry; a Film about Unitying Between Human Existence Nature
Abdolrahman Najl Rahim
On the road, Mr. Badiei (Homayoun Ershadi) drives around in a Range Rover looking for someone to throw earth on his corpse. His reasons for commiting suicide are so obscure that at times one suspects that he -or Kiarostami (director)- might be undertaking the whole experience as a scientific social experiment.
Taste of cherry is based on a structural obsessive repetition, driving along narrow roads through the parched hills. The cumulative effect of these repetations draw the viewer into ever greater complicity with the events and ideas being rehearsed before him in seven successive steps, representing birth to death.
In Kiarostami's film, earth is the center of life and death in nature and human being is a minute part of this large system. Suicide is a humble act against greatness of nature and a will to exercise the essence of unifying links between human existance and nature, and also a painful and ironic attempt to avoid or bypass the troubled conscious mind.
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