The government is blaming unrest on the United States. Most people know better, but reading about American spy rings, and U.S. financed rebel groups makes for entertaining reading. There’s not much other entertainment allowed in Iran.
Strategy Page on Iran
Posted in * International News & Commentary, Middle East
Indeed. Iran is mostly desert, and inhabited by nomadic tribesmen who occupy their time trading the family’s females for ivory-handled daggers. The subjects are occassionally allowed to view, from a distance, the sheiks entertaining themselves at falconry but otherwise must spend their waking hours building ziggurats and mosques. Military intelligence reports that the Parsi cower in fear of US helicopters over the border in Iraq, believing them to be djinn.
One hopes you are speaking in jest.
If I am allowed a robust opinion, I hope that the US and other western allies ARE engaged in disrupting the regime.
I hope that we are identifying opposition groups, funding and training them and actively trying to get them to engage the mullahs in whatever manner may be the best to overthrow them.
Putting US boots on the ground in Iran, is both an impractical and a losing proposition. Allowing and supporting an Irani insurgency, is by far the best way for us to go towards regime change.
The trick is doing so without inflaming Persian nationalism, a very potent force and a history as old as history itself. I would have to be VERY angry indeed with the US gov’t before I would be pleased with (for example) the Iranian gov’t funding groups plotting its overthrow.
The insurgencies are separatist groups in the Baluchistan region and in the former Kurdistan along with disaffected Arabs and some dissident Persians. In short, they are factions in ancient conflicts that we do not understand with the potential to trigger cascading cross-effects, much as the byzantine foreign policies of the European powers led to the entire Continent being engulfed in war because of a single aggressive act by a Serbian separatist against the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire.
One could always take steps to restore the Shah.
http://www.rezapahlavi.org/
Restore the Hashemites to the Caliphate while you are at it. Get rid of the Saudi rascals that rode into Mecca on a lousy camel at FDR’s bidding.
According to the book “Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First-Century Iran” by Geneive Abdo and Jonathan Lyons there are the seeds of democratic thought in Iran even among the mullahs. Considering how western nations achieved democracy, a key question in the middle east is whether a Muslim nation can be democratic.
In the book “Miracle of Miracles: A Muslim Woman’s Conversion to Christ And Flight from the Perils of Islam”, Mina Nevisa describes how she and her family were found by Christ. The kind of miraculous drama that occurred in the first century church is happening now in Iran and other countries. The web site http://www.touchofchrist.net includes recent testimonies.
The Anglican church needs to decide to be obedient and part of the action or to be become increasingly irrelevant.