	Generational Dynamics
	Forecasting America's Destiny ... and the World's

\| HOME \| WEB LOG \| COUNTRY WIKI \| COMMENT \| FORUM \| DOWNLOADS \| ABOUT \|

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 1-Feb-06
State of the Union speech displays continuing misreading of Iran

Web Log - February, 2006

State of the Union speech displays continuing misreading of Iran

It's wishful thinking to believe that an overthrow of the Mullahs is coming.

In Tuesday's State of the Union speech, President Bush said the following about Iran:

Tonight, let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.

This is an echo of an argument that pundits and politicians, mostly on the Republican side, have been making for several years: We've been seeing Iranian college students protesting against the hardline Muslim clerics that run the country, and lately against the new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Their complaints have largely to do with "women's issues," like the women's lib movement in 1960s America.

The reasoning goes that Iran is ripe for a revolutionarly overthrow of the hardline government. This is total nonsense, and even the most elementary generational analysis of the situation shows why.

Let's take this very slowly, step by step, so that it will be understandable to any politician, pundit or journalist who might happen to stumble across this web page:

Iran entered its generational crisis period in the late 1970s, with the overthrow of the Shah, and the establishment of the hardline Islamic regime led at that time by Ayatollah Khomeini. This was widely supported by the Iranian population who were very dissatisfied with the corruption in the Shah's regime, and who supported the overthrow through a very bloody civil war.

That same population that had fought a bloody civil war to overthrow the Shah next had to fight a bloodly war with Iraq, when the latter country invaded Iran with at least tacit American support. Iraq even used mustard gas against Iraq in that war. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians lost their lives in the devastating Iran/Iraq war, but in the end they got the government they had fought for.

Now it's 2006 and a generation has passed. The college students, with no personal memory of the civil war or the war with Iraq, are rioting and demonstrating, demanding more freedom for women.

But their parents, or any Iranian aged 25 or older, lived through that bloody period. They lost their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers as soldiers in the bloody fighting, and they also lost women and children in the Iraqi attacks on civilians. But they were fighting for a cause, and they won, and they're not going to give up that cause now.

And now they hear the Americans, who supported Iraq during the Iran/Iraq war, telling them they should overthrow the leaders that they'd given their sons and daughters for in the 1980s. That's a "You gotta be kidding me!" moment.

Finally, these people were the victims of chemical weapons of mass destruction used by the Iraqis, and now they're facing a world where their enemy, Israel, has nuclear weapons. The Iranian people see nuclear weapons as their guarantee that they won't be victimized by weapons of mass destruction for a second time.

I tried to make that so simple that even a politician or a journalist might be able to understand it, but I won't get my hopes up.

The point is that even if college students are demonstrating against Ahmadinejad and the hardline clerics, the adults in Iran have no interest or desire to go through another period of bloody war, as they just did not long ago. They fought for the clerics, and they'll keep the clerics.

What we're seeing is the increasing hardening of America's position against Iran, when President Bush said, "The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions, and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons."

These words have a sense of a threat behind them, and that will create a reaction in Iraq.

America is not alone in this. The European Union has also been hardening its position against Iran. There's no way to tell where that will lead, but the sense of war against Iran's nuclear facilities is in the air.

There's something else in the air. When Hamas won a major election victory in Palestine last week, it was pretty clear that the major issue would be money -- continued aid from America and the EU, even though a terrorist group was now running the Palestinian government.

The Palestinians are now threatening to obtain aid from elsewhere, and Iran is a potential source of such aid. A close relationship between Hamas and Iran would throw the Mideast into further chaos.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, the Arabs and Jews are heading for a new genocidal crisis war, and it's appearing more and more that Iran will play a major part in that war. The last crisis war between Jews and Arabs was the extremely violent, genocidal war of the late 1940s, when the United Nations partitioned Palestine and created the state of Israel. Generational Dynamics predicts that we're heading for a major new Mideast war, replaying that war, and engulfing the entire region. (1-Feb-06) Permanent Link
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail
Donate to Generational Dynamics via PayPal

Web Log Pages

Current Web Log

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 1-Feb-06 State of the Union speech displays continuing misreading of Iran

Web Log Pages

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 1-Feb-06
State of the Union speech displays continuing misreading of Iran