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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (97321)	5/3/2003 2:03:31 PM
From: EJhonsa	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Thanks for the comments. I've had a passing interest in Iran for a while, for a couple of reasons, but I'm definitely not an expert on the place, and it's always good to find informed commentary given how rare it is within the mainstream press. Just the same, Khatami got many resignations and managed to replace a few critical posts. Yes, this is not as good as prosecuting them for murder...but it was better than many had expected and the assassinations have stopped. Not to belabor the point, but this why the Gorbachev parallels are so hard to buy into. Imagine a historian listing among Gorbachev's greatest political successes the fact that he managed to simply stop the assassinations of his allies. Not even succeeding in bringing the assassins to justice, let alone limiting the power of those factions who supported them, but merely putting an end to their activities. It's just a whole different ballgame. I've asked around about this from people who have recently returned from Iran. The answer is 50:50. The younger generation likes America (not love it). The older generation still has memories of Shah and is wary of America. That's also the impression I've more or less gotten from the Iranian immigrants that I've met. But it's still enough to make me wonder about the degree to which a more hands-off policy in the Midle East, at least for the time being, would be beneficial America's long-term interests. 25 years ago, there probably wasn't a Muslim populace in the region more vituperatively anti-American than the Iraninans. Now, after a whole generation's grown up under a government that considers itself a staunch enemy of the US, the inverse is increasingly true. And in Iraq, even though the US bombed and supported sanctions against the country for over a dozen years, the fact that it opposed and eventually got rid of the tyrant running the place appears to have been enough to make a majority of the people respond positively to the arrival of American troops. Meanwhile, anti-American sentiment in many of the Arab countries whose autocratic governments are viewed by the U.S. as its "allies" is at an all-time high. It's hard to believe that this is a coincidence, and it's enough to make one think that the best long-term solution is to wipe one's hands clean of the region, and wait for the people to come around. Though at the same time, the short-term problems caused by walking away and allowing having half the Arab world or a nuclear-armed Pakistan to be run by governments that are overtly hostile to the U.S. would likely be much larger than the ones caused by the Iranian revolution. Especially since the latter was contained by ethnic and religious differences in ways that an Islamist revolution in, say, Saudi Arabia or Egypt, never could be. Eric