Four years ago Iran saw a lot of student protesting around the presidential election. There was some violent suppression of their dissent. In an effort to spread its views, it funds violent groups in the region, a clear imitation of American foreign policy in the 60s and 70s. Clearly these are evidence that Iran was far ahead of the rest of the Middle East, being only 40 years behind the rest of the world.
Now we're seeing massive outrage and protest over what many claim is a fraudulent election. Does this mean that Iran has moved up to the year 2000? If so, this is a disturbing speed of development. The implications are frightening.
In four years Iran has made 50 years of progress. Obviously there would be no inaccuracies in projecting this into the future. In four years Iran will be in approximately the year 2060. We won't need to worry about nuclear weapons because by then they will have anti-matter weapons and moon colonies from which to launch missiles to anywhere in the solar system. I suggest that by the year 2012 we all learn how to say "We bow to our Iranian overlords" in Arabic.
More seriously, it's a fascinating situation. I'm having no luck relating it to WoW so I apologize.
LOTRO: Umbar at my back, tropical paradise in front
10 hours ago
3 comments:
I think it was always there, just a lot of what we are seeing now was repressed by the local media.
I just know that I've worked alongside a few Iranians and always been impressed by how tolerant, modern thinking, and up to date they were. They also train a lot of female engineers. So none of this surprises me -- I think the country is overripe for change. It's just that a lot of people who disagreed with the regime emigrated.
The part that interests me is why bother to falsify the election? The religious leadership already gets to determine which candidates are allowed to run. So why would it matter which guy wins?
I wonder if there is something going on beneath the surface, like say two factions in the religious leadership clashing, and using this election as their proxy fight.
@Spinks: I'm hopeful. I believe that the reason Iraq had so much trouble is that democracy cannot be imposed, it must instead be fought for. Iranians look ready to fight. With luck it won't have to be too violent, but for that I hold less hope.
@Rohan: My father has a theory for this: the rigging was planned in advance, before the opposition looked to have a chance, when the skewed results would have made perfect sense. None of the opposition candidates looked like a big deal when they were being allowed in to the race and it's hard to pretend to have a democracy if you remove too many people.
TL;DR: They didn't anticipate anything which has happened.
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