Did any of them overthrow your president, install an autocrat and train a death squad in your country for 25 years and support both sides in a war for 8 years.
Had any of them destroyed a country on either side of your border or funded and armed extremists in your country?
Would the above made a difference to how the foreign warships on your coastal waters would be viewed?
Yes SpAM the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was so good for Iran.
Under the Ayatollah, Iran was wrenched backward from widespread economic development and social change and onto a path that was broadly hostile to the Western world.
Many longtime Iranian opponents of the Shah hoped that the Ayatollah would turn over power and allow a democratic society to emerge. But he held to his dream of an Islamic republic and retained his Islamic fervor -scuttling a tentative economic and political opening to the West in February 1989 with his call for the killing of a British author, Salman Rushdie, whose novel ''The Satanic Verses'' was deemed to have blasphemed the faith.
There was no one in Iran with sufficient authority to challenge the Ayatollah successfully. In the aftermath of the revolution, he moved relentlessly toward his theocratic goal, consolidating power and silencing the opposition.
In a frenzy of political retribution and Islamic purification, thousands of people were executed in public, including torturers, criminals, homosexuals, prostitutes and the Shah's officials.
A 1987 report of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights estimated that as many as 7,000 people were shot, hanged, stoned or burned to death after the 1979 revolution.
Lifelong supreme authority was vested in the Ayatollah, with the title Velayat Faghi, or Religious Leader. Wide Dissent in the Land
To the dismay of the National Front and other secular groups that had helped lead the struggle against the Shah and hoped to establish a modern democracy, the Ayatollah moved to impose Islamic rule. Orders Women To Wear Veils
He ordered women to wear veils and chadors, the full-length gowns. He allowed no criticism of his rule, and when his Oil Minister resisted demands for a purge of non-Islamic workers among the industry's 40,000 employees, he dismissed him as a traitor.
Asked by the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1979 about reports of executions of homosexuals, prostitutes and adulterers, the Ayatollah said: ''If our finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off?''
That the Ayatollah's regime managed to survive that grueling conflict was a striking success of sorts. After the initial Iraqi invasion, the Iranian Army, with the help of Revolutionary Guards, threw itself into the defense of the country. Volunteer suicide squads and masses of young conscripts retook land with human wave attacks, and then lost it again, and the Ayatollah's Government used the nationalist fervor to consolidate its rule. The war was fought to a stalemate.
Casualties on both sides were immense and the financial cost enormous. The war threatened a new international oil crisis as attacks increased on tankers in the gulf. In July 1987, the United States put naval forces in the gulf to escort Kuwaiti tankers.
