[lit-ideas] Re: Three Reasons Not to Bomb Iran?Yet

  • From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 09:13:52 -0400

How is a small number enriching themselves at the expense of the majority
different in Iran than in the U.S.?  Even the theocracy here is catching up
It's always easier to see what's wrong with the other guy than in
ourselves.  Let them implode from within.  Why can't we just say, have your
weapons, do what you want with them, sell them to who you want, but if any
are exploded here, you fry big time.  We can take out that country many
times over.  *What* are we worried about?   Why are we not cleaning up our
own problems?  Maybe because this invasion has nothing to do with keeping
us safe?  We're on the brink of being a has been.  Why are we not doing
anything about it beyond painting our faces and throwing spears and
ensuring has been status?



> [Original Message]
> From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 4/19/2006 5:16:10 AM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Three Reasons Not to Bomb Iran?Yet
>
>
> COMMENTARY May 2006
>
> Three Reasons Not to Bomb Iran?Yet
> Edward N. Luttwak
> [excerpt]
>
> Too many clerics have used their official 
> government positions, or their control of 
> confiscated property placed in Islamic trusts, to 
> enrich themselves and their families. Too many 
> have operated scams of all kinds, diverting oil 
> revenues or overcharging the government not only 
> to fund the hugely swollen theological schools 
> whose hordes of pious idlers must be fed and 
> clothed but also for their personal benefit. The 
> most notorious of them all, Ali Akbar Hashemi 
> Rafsanjani, a low-ranking cleric by trade, twice 
> president of the Islamic republic from 1989 to 
> 1997, perennial candidate for another term, 
> chairman of the unelected but powerful ?Expediency 
> Discernment Council,? and a top adviser to the 
> Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, is 
> widely believed to have become Iran?s richest man.
>
> Under the Shah, corruption in government 
> contracting notoriously added some 15 percent to 
> the cost of everything that was bought, from 
> fertilizers for the ministry of agriculture to 
> helicopters. Now the graft is more like 30 
> percent; the family and cronies of the Shah, it 
> turns out, were paragons of self-restraint as 
> compared with the clerics. They now form an entire 
> class of exploiters, with the result that a bitter 
> anti-clericalism has become widespread in Iran as 
> it never was before.
>
> Having lost all its moral authority, the regime 
> must survive on the power of coercion alone, 
> derived from the brutish part-time Basij militia 
> of poor illiterates and the full-time Pasdaran 
> Inqilab, or ?Revolutionary Guards,? whose forces 
> are structured in ground, air, and naval combat 
> units but whose men can still be sent into action 
> as enforcers against protesting civilians. With 
> the rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the first 
> non-cleric to win Iran?s presidency and himself a 
> former engineering officer in their ranks, the 
> Pasdaran have become an important political 
> faction as well as a military force, a political 
> gendarmerie, and a business conglomerate.
>
> It is one more symptom of the regime?s 
> degeneration that, although the Pasdaran are well 
> paid by local standards, they complement their 
> salaries by engaging in both legal and illegal 
> business, from manufacturing to contraband across 
> the Persian Gulf. The Pasdaran?s naval arm 
> operates fast patrol boats from seven Iranian 
> ports and the Halul oil platform. They are used to 
> smuggle in products from foreign hulls or from the 
> port of Dubai, not only embargoed items for 
> national purposes but also perfumes and other 
> luxury products for private money-making.
>
> full article at: 
> http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Production/files/luttwak0506.html
>
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