Very good point Buck. The law of unintended consequences, eh ?
Chuck
-----Original Message-----
From: cpf0000-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:cpf0000-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Buck Calabro
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 8:21 AM
To: Open discussion among iSeries Users
Subject: Re: [CPF0000] What value Pakistan?
Thread reconstruction for the almost-criminally insane anti-top-poster
<grin/>
Buck wrote:
Supporting this behavior is actually causing chaos, violence and
fueling the radicals.
Tom replied:
I have a hard time seeing how the current situation has much
sociological difference from our previous support of the Shah. I can't
see a conclusion much different from what happened to Iran.
Rick added:
or, our discontinuation of support for the Shah?
I had a very difficult time composing my answer. I so don't want this
to turn into a critique of the (non) foreign policy of the Carter era
vs the (non) foreign policy of this Bush era. Once we removed the
support of the Shah, natural events were allowed to take their course
and his regime fell. The unnatural part was that another dictator
took his place and the people of Iran quietly allowed that to happen.
My personal belief is that the new dictatorship was possible because
our long term support of the Shah made the organs of oppression live
on past his reign. The Ayatollah was able to immediately use the
secret police, the army, the regular police and who knows what other
agents to his own ends because those agents were entrenched in Iranian
society and not as easily dislodged as the Shah himself.
If we had let the Shah's tenure collapse much earlier, would the
radicals have had the same political strength in Iran? Would the
secret police have been such an intimate part of Iranian society as to
be usable by the next dictator?
--buck
