One thing history tends to teach is that shooting from the hip about ongoing events will often tend to make you look like a complete asshat in retrospect. So I’m not going to theorize on what’s going to happen; the Berlin Wall might be falling, or the tanks could be rolling into Tienanmen Square. We don’t know. We especially don’t know because just about everyone in the West of non-Iranian descent was caught completely off guard by this, which means our media and policy makers have as clear a view of the situation on the ground there as they do about the internal workings of North Korea.
Categories: politics
1 Comment
ryan · July 4, 2009 at 4:11 pm
the mainstream political parties try to paint a very simple picture of Iran. whether to have a bogeyman to point at, or to ramp up an invasion that suits their political goals. people get excited about it.
Much of Iran is reasonably modern, or not much worse than Turkey.
Lisa Morgonelli, in her book “Oil on the Brain”, devoted a chapter to Iran. She visited an Oil engineer there. She interviewed women who enjoy driving around in cars recklessly at night. wealthy and middle class Iranians take vacations in Europe and send their children to european boarding schools.
what the Iranian protests mean, no one can say. the 1968 riots at the democratic national convention didn’t change anything. the protests at the WTO meeting in Seattle didn’t change anything. all those protests against the Viet Nam war didn’t change much.
The most America will ever achieve in Iraq is undoing some of the damage the U.S. did to Iraq. I’m pretty sure we are incapable of doing a better job in Iran. Republicans will tout the redneck vote of wanting to “teach Iran a lesson” and also somehow redeem Iran through “regime change”.
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