IRAN: The people and the regime

I said Iraq would be an easier but to crack than Iran, meaning that it is a smaller and less well armed country. Martin Storey comments: "A big difference must be that Iran was a relatively peaceful and wealthy country until fairly recently, and most adults remember the time before the revolution, when there was a much larger middle-clas The mollahs are notoriously corrupt, and there is no single personality propped up by a cult machine. Based on intuition and my time working for an Iranian company just last year, I suppose that Iranian support for their regime is much, much weaker than Iraqis' support for theirs. I mean specifically that fewer people have been brainwashed effectively to the point where they would fight to prevent a foreign attack from overthrowing their current regime. This may hold for the scientists who know about chemical weapons, and perhaps even for the army. The people of Iran are starving for democracy and liberalism much more visibly than the longer-suffering people of Iraq. Let's always remember not to identify the government of a country with its people. So then "Iraq is presumably an easier nut to crack than Iran": is it not the other way around? Who needs to crack any nut anyway, and again, why now?"

RH:Some people think it is nutty to try crack either country now. My wife and I circled the globe going west, and we arrived in Iran at the end of the Shah's regime. We found it much more westernized and pleasant than most of the parts of Asia we had visited. I believe the US should try to establish a positive relationship with the country, not the regime.

Ronald Hilton - 3/1/03