It will take us a while to figure out why the enforcers of a long exhausted Islamic revolution behaved as they did, but it’s clear that many of the assumptions made by the Foggy Bottom crowd were completely false — not least the supposed differences between the mullahs and Ahmadinejad, whom they were reported to despise for everything from his nuclear bloviating to his allegedly low standards of personal hygiene. Our concerns are largely irrelevant: Obama? They don’t care about his speeches. The nukes? They’ll happen regardless, with wide support. This election was stolen for reasons of internal survival and long-term regional strategy by a regime confident enough to snub not just a U.S. government promoting impotence as moral virtue but those allies in Europe who regularly jet in to offer cooing paeans to the vibracy of Iranian democracy.
So I doubt we’ll see a Kostunica scenario play out. Indeed, given Iran’s collapsed demographics and other structural defects, we seem on the brink not of popular revolution but of a malign mutation of the Islamic republic into something even more virulent and destabilizing.
Long story short – let’s not be too hasty in assuming that the current strife in Iran is the harbinger of an anti-theocracy revolution. Especially not when President Obama is encouraging the mullahs and discouraging the reformists through his public pronouncements.
While economies across the globe are in meltdown mode, the banks in Lebanon appear flush, offering hefty interest rates on savings. The Lebanese have had a knack for business and banking since Phoenician times, when they traded with every nation around the Mediterranean. But one likely reason for the country’s current economic health is the vast amounts of money pouring in to influence the general election scheduled for June 7.
