International relations class: comparative politics - Research Paper Example

Download file to see previous pages What makes a dictator hated by the people was the overt brutality and mercurial tendency of a leader which is the trait of Ghaddafi’s leadership. II. Summary of the films The films that will be subjected for analysis will be Argo and The Dictator. Argo is situated in Iran during the height of Ayatollah’s regime. The story begun when militants stormed the US embassy in Tehran where embassy employees were taken as hostages. Six employees were able to escape and was able to hide in the house of Canadian Ambassador. The US government in an effort to get them out of Iran consulted a CIA specialist Tony Mendez who proposed a cover of making a sci-fi movie entitled Argo. The proposal was hesitantly approved and all necessities to make the shoot look authentic were set-up. Until finally CIA specialist Tony Mendez arrived in Tehran to exfiltrate the six embassy employees using Canadian passports and fake identities under the cover of a moview shooting. Though they had difficulty with the guards at the airport, the six employees including Mendez was able to escape Tehran. The second movie is a comedy flick entitled The Dictator. Although the film was largely full of mirth, it encapsulated the the general idea of how dictators rule in the Middle East. The dictator was played by the eccentric Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen whose circumstances has a strong resemblance with the killed/murdered dictator Muammar Ghaddafi who ruled Wadiya that has a strong semblance to Libya. He travelled to UN Headquarters in New York to address the issue lodged against him about his nuclear build up where his demeanor as a dictator became a recipe for comedy. III. Review of academic articles The article "All The Ayatollah's Men" discussed how Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic differed from other revolutionary government or other absolute government in the Middle East as Iran during his rule adopted the ideology of religion where Islam is the official dogma of the state (Takeyh 51). It tackled Iran’s repulsion towards the US government with its perceived imperialism and “unpure” ways (being an imperialistic non-Muslim) and more particularly when US sheltered the exiled Shah of Iran. This is the backdrop of the film Argo where US embassy employees were abducted by the storming militants who were protesting US perceived intervention for the former Shah. The article also gave an idea of the extreme religiosity of the state and Khomeini’s deep influence among its people. Emery on the other hand discussed the consequences of Iran’s abduction of its US Embassy employees that lasted for over a year whereby an economic sanction was pressed against Iran. This was systematically imposed by President Carter through a series of establishing financial disincentive and economic sanction in Iran with the hope that this will induce a crisis that will lead to fall of Khomeini. Among other measures applied were the US embargo of Iranian oil and an unprecedented financial block on Iran’s dollar assets (372). Despite of these pressures, Khomeini’s administration survived where he remain to his post as its leader until his death in 1989. Ghaddafi on the other hand ruled through Libya by using his Third Theory as contained in his Green Book. Beckwith expounded on this albeit he wrote of Ghaddafi on less amiable terms with him describing the ...Download file to see next pagesRead More