It's what's going on inside Iran that matters
Issandr El Amrani | Iran Interesting piece by Gary Sick on Iran:
The key question about Iran today is not whether it will be attacked or collapse under sanctions. It is whether Iran is capable under its present leadership to take a sober decision about how to deal with the outside world. The Revolutionary Guards have established a dominant position in Iran’s military, its economy, and its politics. Iran increasingly comes to resemble the corporatist states of southern and eastern Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s that we call fascist. Iran is conducting an interior battle with its own demons, from the millenarians on the far right who choose to believe that Khamene`i is the personal representative of God on earth, to the pragmatic conservatives who simply want a more responsible leadership, to the reformists of the Green movement whose objective is to put the “republic” back into the Islamic Republic by giving the people a greater voice.
This is a yeasty and unpredictable mix. No one knows what is going to happen next.
And this is the reality that the Obama administration must deal with. The danger is not that the administration will back the wrong horse in Iran. The real danger is that the Obama administration will be so preoccupied with domestic American politics and its constant demand to look tough when dealing with Iran that it will inadvertently rescue this cruel but hapless regime from its own ineptitude by providing a convenient scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in Iran.
I would still be cautious about a strike on Iran happening — Israel and its allies in America are as irrational as Ahmedinejad — but good to remember the dramatic internal shifts that have taken place in Iran in the last decade, empowering a new breed of plutocrats from the RGs.
Reader Comments (2)
I don't find Sick's piece interesting at all. It's nothing but another version of the same damn obsession with 'regime change' in Iran. And what I find disturbing, very disturbing, is that Sick talks about the 'yeasty mix', such a nice turn of phrase, as if the USA had nothing to do with that 'mix' via its various and sundry HEAVILY FUNDED and at times utterly brutal and vicious, terroristic, covert ops. Yeah, right, let's just ignore all that. And let's ignore the decades of brutal economic war against Iran, recently escalated.
You know what? It's about time we try to 'give leaving them the hell alone' a chance, wouldn't you agree? THAT would be an interesting article to see.
Can't say I agree with you — Sick is known not to be in favor of regime change or a strike on Iran, so it's not like his piece is advocating that. It's just pointing out that there are major inner regime changes taking place and that these will be more important for the country in the long term.