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| Axis of Evil |
| David Warren does Iran... |
| 2002-07-18 |
Read the whole thing. This is only bits and pieces. It's typical Warren, only better'n most, and he's always first-class...Iran has come to the boil. Against the background of huge public demonstrations, the reformist party that controls the largest block of seats in the elected but largely powerless Iranian Parliament yesterday threatened to walk out, if the ayatollahs continued to stall measures for social and political change..."Coming to a boil"... I've heard that somewhere before... Last Friday afternoon, while the media were checking out for the weekend, the U.S. president, George W. Bush, delivered his most under-reported speech. It was timed to land Friday morning in Iran, Islamic sermon time, and this was part of the intended effect. The White House was delivering a "maximal" affront to Iran's "maximal" Shia fundamentalist regime. The speech deviated from the previous U.S. policy, which had been re-enunciated earlier in the week at a State Department press conference, of having nothing to say about Iranian demonstrations. It was fed to Iran in Persian ("Farsi" to the snobs), by a private, Iranian-exile satellite TV station in Los Angeles.The ayatollahs have been turning themselves inside out over it for the past week. I think Bush's plan is to kill them off by mass apoplexy... The "reform process" in Iran turns out to be similar to the "peace process" that re-launched Arafat in Oslo: something that takes forever, and moves consistently backwards.So... Y'think Bush unplugged the Reform Processor and put it away? It is the principal source of arms for the world's Islamist terrorists; and the power behind a huge buildup in weaponry including medium-range missiles by the Hezbollah in Lebanon (who operate there under Syrian protection. At least twice in the present year, Israel has been on the verge of going to war with Syria, to destroy this growing cache.)Yep. They're much more deeply involved with the machinery of terrorism than we even thought, and we thought they were pretty deeply involved. In a further sign that the regime was losing its grip, it then confined its police to barracks in Isfahan, as it had done the previous day in Tehran -- doubting their loyalty. Instead they sent foreign thugs with paramilitary training, chiefly Palestinian and Iraqi Arabs, and Uzbeks and Tadzhiks from Afghanistan, to beat the demonstrators down. It was a desperate measure -- an implicit acknowledgement that the whole Persian people have now sided with the opposition.Yes! Yes! Yessss! We heard the rumors of bringing in the out-of-town thugs. Steve White caught that one. That always works really well. Just look at... ummm... well, it works. Really. The students first, and now every part of Iranian society except the people whose livelihoods depend on the tyranny, demand re-admission to the modern, explicitly Western, world. (Several of the Persians I correspond with have emphasized this point: "We are a Western people. We are not part of the East.")We sometimes forget. Persians are not Arabs. They used to be a civilized people. The question remains: are the mad mullahs finally entering the garbage chute of history? It is the question we asked of the Soviet regime, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and of the Chinese Communists in Tiananmen Square. Neither regime was reformable. The Soviets lost their nerve, and collapsed; the Chinese politburo, red in tooth and claw, massacred and survived. The Bush administration is betting, for the moment, that the unreformable ayatollahs will lose their nerve. But if they do somehow keep it, the U.S. Fifth Fleet is waiting offshore.When it happens it will happen almost overnight. It will be like the bursting of a bubble. And much of the trouble in the Middle East will burst with it. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #2 I think Warran might have too rosy an assessment of the degree of support for the U.S. to be found there, and I hope I'm wrong. Prior to the fall of the Shah, the Persians I knew were all very civilized, very intelligent, very secular people. The were also virtually all military or diplomatic people. Even though I knew I wasn't meeting a cross-section of Iran, I was still surprised at the level of anti-Americanism that showed up with the arrival of Khomeini. And after the fall of the Shah, I was surprised when some of them changed their hats. I think that there's probably a degree of support for the West in the abstract in Iran, and in some other circles a support for the USA for reasons both good and bad, and probably a few silly reasons as well. While my tongue wasn't too far into my cheek when I said they used to be a civilized country, we have to keep in mind that the civilization's Persian, not American. I think the Shah went too far in his efforts toward secularization and ended up with an unreasoned backlash that the theocrats took advantage of; but they made the mistake of imposing a system that's essentially foreign to the country, more Arab in its approach than Persian. The ayatollahs are generally smarter than the Afghan mullahs, and their turbans are cleaner, but the system's not that different. They're rushing headlong toward a fall because they're lousy administrators and they're convinced of their infallibility. If you're infallible, you don't need no damned opinions from the Great Unwashed. When they're gone - and it might even happen before Iraq's taken out - it's going to leave a hole in the terror machinery that it'll take one hell of a lot of Saudi money to fill. The ayatollahs are the drivers behind Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and they are probably the ultimate controllers of Hamas. With a nationalist regime in Tehran, enjoying a civilization that's Persian rather than "Islamic," that produces a huge counterweight to the Arabians and their always xenophobic and often amateurish plots. With both Iran and Iraq out of the way, the Sauds are pretty well left standing buck nekkid in a snow storm, surrounded by a pack of wolves. Bush might not be counting on having to do anything about the House of Saud... |
| Posted by: Fred 2002-07-18 16:33:46 |
| #1 Warrens' article is terrific! I read it and found myself going 'huh?' "lighted candles to mourn the victims of 9/11", "Stars and Stripes gets unfurled" etc etc. My view of Persians has always been coloured by the events of 1979, those raving ayatollahs and the insane 'human wave' battles with the Iraqis. Looks like I need get a bit more clued-up regarding Iran. Bush has been making some very smart moves recently; "The Speech" that has taken out Arafat and shown up most of our EU pinhead 'leaders' (yup, I live in England) to be the idiotarians we always really knew them to be, and now this. People, we do live in interesting times. The Islamofascists started something that they are going to have a very very hard time stopping. Now then, I wonder what Bush is going to do to the House of Saud... |
| Posted by: Tony 2002-07-18 15:52:33 |