By Con Coughlin
In his book, "Khomeini's Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam", Con Coughlin tries to find answers to these questions and more. Coughlin, who writes in the British Daily Telegraph newspaper, is one of the most famous European correspondents in the Middle East. He closely followed up the events after Khomeini Revolution in 1979. He worked for years as a correspondent in Lebanon. In this way, he knew too much about the influence of Khomeini on Hezbollah.
The publication of this book coincides with the 30 anniversary of Khomeini Islamic Revolution of Iran. President Barak Obama who has been recently inaugurated as US president tries to adopt a new approach to Tehran to put an end to three years of enmity initiated by Khomeini, the godfather of the Islamic Revolution of Iran. Diplomatic approach of Obama to Tehran comes at a time in which Iranian regime is trying to "export" the Khomeini Revolution to the Arab world – and perhaps to the whole world- coincidentally with Tehran's attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. These attempts, the writer thought, have come in compliance with Khomeini's Strategy since Khomeini ordered his followers to build a nuclear bomb during Iran's war with Iraq. Coughlin swears that the dialogue of Obama with Tahran Mullas who firmly stick to Khomeini's nuclear guidelines would be a failure.
In the first part of the book the writer tries to get us acquainted with Khomeini, the 70 years old Islamic militant, who overthrew the Shah regime and established a fundamentalist Islamic regime in Iran. The second part of the book examines the Khomeini legacy, especially after his death in 1989, and the current impact of the Khomeini revolution on the whole of the Middle East region, from Lebanon to Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza. Iran has founded radical Islamic armed groups, and continues to fund them and train their elements.
Who is Khomeini? The writer sees Khomeini as an "extremist and a hard-liner in the Taliban way ". He sees him as a stringent fundamentalist, who is biased to his Persian and Shiite origins, but who "aspired to be a source of inspiration to the Arab world's Sunni majority".
Khomeini was determined to acquire nuclear weapons for his "disastrous Islamic project". The writer said that "the quest for a nuclear bomb was a substantial part of Khomeini's legacy."
In the second part of the book Coughlin further describes the "dirty work", pursued by Iran in the era of the revolution, since 1979 until today. Coughlin links the Khomeini regime with all the terrorist operations involving Muslims in the past thirty years. He mentions in particular the responsibility of the Iranian "Islamic Revolutionary Guard" in training "Al Qaeda" fighters in special camps in Sudan, in preparation for the September 11 - September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Khomeini – according to the writer's opinion- is the "Godfather of Islamic terror". And the regime he created is "the first global sponsor of Islamic terrorism."
That regime still supports the militant Islamic movements whether they were Sunni or Shiite. The Khomeini ideology had a negative effect on the relationship between the West and the Islamic world. Iran will continue to play its destructive role as long as it is governed by the "heirs of Khomeini", and as long as the Iranian people continue to act under the false belief that "the only way to appease the Khomeini regime is to comply with it". Thus, the question that we should ask ourselves today is not: "do we fight a war against Iran or not?" The essential question is: "How to end the war that Iran has been waging against the United States for three decades now?"
Sometimes Coughlin "exaggerates too much and goes too far" in this book. And, in other times he falls in the trap of "generalization and shallowness", as Iranian writer "Ozdah Moavini" described him in the "New York Times". However, this book remains an impressive record of the Khomeini revolution since its early days until now.
