sdemetri,
The young age of the average Iranian argues against military action unless you wish to alienate the majority of the population, and perpetrate violence against the West.
You’re again assuming that the mullahs do not have a strategy to cultivate the loyalties of the young and turn them against the West. They do, as I mentioned, in the form of the promise of Middle Eastern hegemony and honorable deaths in battle. This also appeals to the Shia sense that they’ve been oppressed throughout Islamic history, which means that Iran would have imperial designs on the Middle East regardless of whether the US existed or not. Simply refusing to address this by saying these youths (again, which youth, the drugged out youth or the politically engaged youth?) want Western technology, blue jeans, blah blah blah, is naive and uninformed. If the Western-loving youth can’t see the bigger picture that regime change is going to cause some causualties on their side, too, are they really mature enough to know what they want? They should know the score better than any of us and be willing to sacrifice to see us overthrow the mullahs, if that’s what they really wanted. If I were one of these Western-loving youths sitting in Tehran right now, I’d be of the opinion that better a few of my Western-loving comrades die than that the mullah regime live. If they are incapable of making that trade-off AND incapable of remaking Iranian politics in their own, non-second-Holocaust-seeking image, they simply become expendable, in the harsh logic of international relations.
Additionally, according to the Washington Post, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is more powerful now than they’ve been since the early days of the Islamic Revolution.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/31/AR2007033101105.html?hpid=topnews
Key section:
The Guard gained stature during Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq, when it fought some of the toughest battles, provided human minesweepers and took huge casualties. That generation has now come of leadership age, said Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service, the author of “Warriors of Islam,” a book about the Guard.
“They fought as young men, and now they’re middle-aged. They have gone from the battlefield to mayoralties, governates and management of ministries,” Katzman said. Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf was a senior Guard commander.
Maybe if Iran were just made up of ‘aging mullah’s and ‘pro-Western youth’, you might have a point. But it isn’t and your ‘youth’ are probably not going to be a match for the Revolutionary Guards any time soon. Seriously, I don’t know what you are basing your optimism on with regards Iran, other than the fact that you’ve repeated the optimists mantra so many times you can’t think anything else.
What’s more, in 936 words you could give me no answer to that simple, I dare say, ancient question of how pounding anyone into submission will act as a deterent against future ambitions and violence.
How do you think the world got it’s current politico-military configuration? It was by the current world powers pounding into submission would-be world powers. Hell, the world’s current configuration is called the “Post-WWII world”, not the “Post-UN Security Council Negotiations world”! Identifying rivals to hegemony and pounding them into submission is almost the definition of history. When Joyce wrote of history, he didn’t call it “A series of polite negotiations resulting in the realization that all disagreements between states were just misunderstandings”, he called it “A nightmare from which I am trying to awake”. The way you write, it’s as though pounding Germany and Japan into submission didn’t work. Do you just string words together not knowing what they mean?
Especially in the current context, whether real or imagined, of a clash of cultures, of the West against Islam, where the Shiite/Sunni divide is likely to take a backseat under the perceived threat of further Western hegemony in the region.
Depends who you ask. One of the leading Saudi sheiks just pronounced the Shia to be worse enemies of Islam than either the Jews or Americans. The rationale, of course, is that whereas no Sunni would ever become a Jew or a true American, he might become a Shia. So, again, your analytical superficiality shows through in your belief that somehow your statement about the Sunni/Shia divide being submerged under the need to confront a common enemy is analytically sound.
Your doctrine is a dangerous one, promised to benefit war profiteers and investors… but no one else. No one else. What’s in your stock portfolio…?
I hedge myself against disaster, for sure. It’s relatively easy and I suggest everyone should. It probably won’t matter, because when a nuke goes off somewhere in the world and my hedge offsets my losses, the government will probably take the money anyway through some kind of ‘terrorism windfall’ tax. C’est la vie.
However, the notion that I’m somehow trying to profit personally shows AGAIN that you don’t really read what I’m saying. If I wanted to profit personally from the current global situation, in which naive men like you are leading the West (and me) down a path of destruction, I’d just become a Muslim. Obviously, I am what the politically correct would call a “Neanderthal” with “regressive” ideas. I would fit right in in Islam. And I’d even get to have four wives, should I want them.
AWJ: In international relations, yes, if one is the hegemon, one should strive to be held in awe by ones enemies and be primus inter pares among ones allies. In domestic relations, I prefer small r republicanism, mainly because I don’t think people should preoccupy themselves with politics as much as they would have to in a democracy. Although, if I did have to live in a democracy, I prefer the Greek system of election by lot, rather than the demagogy of direct elective democracy.
