On 1/13/07, Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>Saddam was a creation not of the left, but of the right. He was armed and financed to fight the Iranian Fundamentalists... That was a good thing at the time, wasn't it? Otherwise Iran might have conquered Iraq back then and have had the combined oil revenue and population of Iran/Iraq since the 1980s. What would it be like if Iran had conquered Iraq in the '80s? (A sci-fi exercise comparable to _The Man in the High Castle_.)
The Man in the High Castle is a crappy metaphor. The novel assumes that Japan and Germany won WWII and divided North America between them. The combined population of Iran and Iraq would be less than 100 million (about 1/3d the size of the USA). After a generation of oil wealth and the corruptions it brings, Iranians would be looking and acting like Arabs in Dhubai (Seen any of the "Games of your life" commercials for the 2006 Asian Games?). Alternatively, they might still being bled white by Sunni insurgents and turning for aid to Israel in combating a plague on both their houses. Lots of possible futures out there. John -- John McCreery The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN Tel. +81-45-314-9324 http://www.wordworks.jp/
