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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (53756)	7/10/2004 10:33:20 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793955

The Iranian people do not support their government and want reform. The question is not what they want, but how badly they want it and what they are willing to risk to get it. So far, when push has come to shove, the Iranian reformers have backed down. I see no reason to suppose that this is likely to change. When the Iranians threw out the Shah, a lot of people got shot. When demonstrators got killed, the funerals turned into bigger demonstrations. When those demonstrators were fired on, the demonstrations got even bigger. Those demonstrators got what they were demonstrating for. A year ago, mass demonstrations were planned in Iran. I remember David Warren, among others, gloating that the day of the mullahs was over. The mullahs made noises about getting tough, and the demonstrations fizzled. That kind of movement isn't going to overthrow anybody. The generalization of "the Iranian people" is also a very risky thing. Certainly the educated, urban middle class doesn't think much of the mullahs. They are not "the Iranian people". Much of the population is rural, and very religious, and that's where the government's support base is. You can bet your last dollar that the clergy has been playing up the threat of imminent invasion, and external threat always rallies support behind the existing government. I suspect that our presence in Iraq has hurt the reform movement more than it has helped. The difficulty is, that Iraq seems to be the only case where they had less than we thought. It's also the case everybody saw. Our public tolerance for war is limited. Karl Rove sure as hell doesn't want another war, and even the Neocons are keeping fairly quiet. Maybe that will change after the election, maybe it won't. The problem is that we shot our wad when we weren't threatened, and now that we aren't threatened, nobody wants to deal with it. Some people thought that action in Iraq would intimidate countries like Iran, and that we wouldn't have to do it again. They were wrong. That was a big miscalculation, with potentially devastating consequences. I wonder if anyone will own up to that particular mistake?