Death of Khomeini

Shireen Hunter’s Op-Ed Page obituary for Ayatollah Khomeini (“Last of the Great Third World Leaders, Khomeini Tore Down Better Than He Built,” June 6) has no place in our country. We should care less that the old man, whose long-awaited and overdue demise we should be celebrating for a long time to come, was a liberator for his own people. We should, more normally, care about what he meant for our national interests. And this is far different than ignoring changes and events in the world; on the contrary, we can duly deal with our enemies only when we grasp their threats.

Hunter asserts that “Khomeini was the last of the great Third World leaders, in the category of Mao Tse-tung, Gamal Abdul Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah.” Her plea is little comfort to the massacred Chinese students who only demanded freedom, the Egyptian Islamic fundamentalists who detest Nasser’s secular and repressive legacy, or native Gold Coasters who saw little worldly benefit from Nkrumah’s socialism.

Hunter could have also mentioned a whole slew of Third World losers from our proud past, among them Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo (Zaire), Gen. Sukarno of Indonesia, Salvador Allende of Chile, and, heaven forbid we forget, Che Guevara of Cuba. The stark point is that these men and their ideas were and are against America’s interests; and just as they placed their people’s interests above all others’, so too we should act just as normally and uphold our national interests first and foremost.

The last thing we should do is to give any space in our country to glorification of or empathy for our enemies, or, in the case of the Khomeinists, allow them to operate in our country under a tax-exempt, multimillion dollar cover. It is an unfortunate fact that, at least in our republic, alien creatures who would destroy our country can freely propagandize against us on our soil.

S.A.M. GHA’EMI

Arlington, Va.