Posted on 07/07/2009 12:18:36 PM PDT by presidio9
The most exciting and underreported news of the past few weeks in Iran has been that the emerging challenger to the increasingly frantic and isolated "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. And Rafsanjani has recently made a visit to the city of Najaf in Iraq to confer with Ayatollah Ali Husaini Sistani, a long-standing opponent of the Khamenei doctrines, as well as meeting in the city of Qum with Jawad al-Shahristani, who is Sistani's representative in Iran. It is this dialectic between Iraqi and Iranian Shiites that underlies the flabbergasting statement issued from Qum last weekend to the effect that the Ahmadinejad government has no claim to be the representative of the Iranian people.
One of the apparent paradoxes involved in visiting Iran is this: If you want to find deep-rooted opposition to the clerical autocracy, you must make a trip to the holy cities of Mashad and Qum. It is in places like this, consecrated to the various imams of Shiite mythology, that the most stubborn and vivid criticism is often to be heard—as well as the sort of criticism that the ruling mullahs find it hardest to deal with.
So it is very hard to overstate the significance of the statement made last Saturday by the Association of Teachers and Researchers of Qum, a much-respected source of religious rulings,
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Following that logic the “toppling” of Hitler led to the Soviet Union
The situation in Iran has been brewing since day one (1979/80). The Iran-Iraq war was the single largest lid that kept dissent from exploding (rally 'round the flag effect).
It didn't take the situation in Iraq for dissent in Iran finally to errupt. The straw that broke the back, was the blatant fraud of nutjob and Co. which took away even the last faux "democratic" trappings of the system. Until now the elections at least gave the feeling of having a channel to vent the energy. This has been now taken away.
Duh. This was one of the stated reasons for establishing democaracies in Iraq and Afghanistan...they are BOTH on Iran’s border.
It was only a matter of time before the desire for freedom took hold.
No, it was the toppling of the Shah, courtesy of jimmy carter, that led to recent events in Iran.
Whatever else we might say about Bush, it was his unashamed belief in the universal hunger for democratic norms—and in a foreign policy which supported that belief—that made his presidency so important in the on-going contest between the West and the Ummah’s theocrats.
Sadly, Bush’s replacement seems far more comfortable in the company of America’s enemies than in the company of its friends...
Well said.
Wrong. Your analogy does not fit.
The idea that the toppling of Hitler led the Soviet Union (which, by the way, pre-existed Hitler’s Germany), implies the elimination of one evil led to a greater evil, and therefore Hitler should have been left alone.
The point of the article is that the elimination of Saddam, and the freedom of the Iraqi people has lead to opposition in Iran against the ruling theocracy and it’s henchmen. Freedom in the one infecting its neighbor with a similar desire.
Toppling Hitler did not result in the Soviet Union. But The removal of Saddam may well result in eventual freedom in Iran as an emboldened Shiite majority in Iraq challenges the domination of Iran’s clerics, and encourages Iranians themselves to do the same.
Show freedom in the dictatorships of the Middle East or elsewhere and it inspires others (the young) to want the same.
I understand the Iranian protestors (youth) used their own Rap music to inspire.
With the use of the Internet, times are changing with revolution(s) being fought via.
If I am not mistaken, the absorption of smaller and weaker states that went on to become part of the Soviet Union actually began before the Great Patriotic War.
Ok. I agree
Dugg!
That is pretty much what I said...
...the Soviet Union (which, by the way, pre-existed Hitler’s Germany)...
Communist Russia began imposing its rule in central/southern asia and the trans-caucus around the black sea. After the Revolution, many regions that had been under Czarist rule broke away and formed independent states (or tried to), only to be re-absorbed into the new Soviet Union. Soviet reach went beyond areas that had been under czarist control as well.
The countries of Eastern Europe that fell under Soviet control after WWII were not part of the Soviet Union, but occupied and controlled by it. Hence the term "East Bloc".
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