Iran's new province

[Skybird]

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/14677922.htm

(I like the absurdity of the starting picture, btw.)

http://today.reuters.com/business/newsarticle.aspx?type=tnBusinessNews&storyID=nKAR643258&imageid=&cap=

[STEED]

Predictable piece of news. :shifty:

[Abraham]

As far as the absurdity of the picture goes: 'normal' life doesn't stop during military action. There are the weirdest WW II stories of civilians going their daily way in between fierce firefights.

[Konovalov]

As far as the absurdity of the picture goes: 'normal' life doesn't stop during military action. There are the weirdest WW II stories of civilians going their daily way in between fierce firefights.

I was thinking exactly the same thing when looking at that particular photograph.

[Ducimus]

Can't say im surpised.

I was watching a piece on Iran on the history channel some months ago, and if the program aired is to be considered a credible source, then Iran would have ambitions to restore itself to the powerhouse country it once was in the ancient world. (Persian Empire if im not mistaken) And if the impression i get of Islam to look back at the ancient world as the "good ole days of islam" (quoations by me) is correct, then that would explain the rise of fundamentalism.

And if all that is true, then its a shame really. Instead of evolving and moving foward with the world, they want to go back in time and live in the stone age of man kind and all its primitive trappings. Put all the pieces together and look at the big picture, i can't help but wonder if war is invevitable.

[scandium]

Instead of evolving and moving foward with the world, they want to go back in time and live in the stone age of man kind and all its primitive trappings. Put all the pieces together and look at the big picture, i can't help but wonder if war is invevitable.
This is one of the key points on which my opinions on "Islam" are different from most others here: its not over which century "they" prefer to be in, but who it is that makes up this "they". To me its the theocrats in charge who are to blame. They are the ones with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The people themselves go along with it partly because it is indoctrinated into them from birth, and partly because the pressure to conform there is unbelievably high (as evidenced by the various forms of repression practiced there coupled with the severe forms of corporal and capital punishments handed out to those who commit infractions of it).

As proof I again cite the dark ages of our own European ancestry and subsequent enlightenment. All of which took centuries, of course, but at the same time there was no modern world surrounding it to create pressure to adapt and evolve. Naysayers will point out that Muslim emigrants seemingly refuse to adapt to their new host cultures, and that this is proof of how hardened "Islam" is to change. I would point out that even when the Puritans left the religious persecution of the Old World it wasn't long before they began persecuting each other in the New World (the Salem witch trials). Eventually rational thought prevailed and they evolved beyond that.

All of which would be a little off topic except for this: we do little in the cause of "modernization" of their culture and society when we destroy one of the very few secular societies in the middle east (Iraq) only to see created in its place yet another theocracy. Not to mention the thousands killed in this so called "just cause" for the theocrats to rally their very captive audience around. What is that saying that parents tell their children... play with matches, expect to get burned? If Iraq should become a province of Iran then things really will have gone full circle.

[Ducimus]

. To me its the theocrats in charge who are to blame. They are the ones with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The people themselves go along with it partly because it is indoctrinated into them from birth, and partly because the pressure to conform there is unbelievably high (as evidenced by the various forms of repression practiced there coupled with the severe forms of corporal and capital punishments handed out to those who commit infractions of it).

Which is one of the reasons why im becoming more and more convinced that war, is inevitable. To root out the problem, means two words bush is famous for.

Regime Change.

Its funny, the theorcrats are essentually muslim clerics, and they always seem to look the same with a black turban giving some speech with their finger pointed in the air as if to emphasis their point. Kinda like these two more well known clerics from iraq:
http://boortz.com/images/al_sadr.jpghttp://www.westernresistance.com/blog/archives/images/sistani.jpg

This is the visual essense of the real iranian leadership, only they hide behind a puppet president as a mouth piece.

The BBC put up a nice piece on who holds the real power in Iran.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/03/iran_power/html/default.stm

With people like that in charge of the country... well.... nothign rational will come of it. How can negotiate with a country whos goverment is essentualy founded on religous ferver? (and as a preemtive response, "the US is too", we do have a formal speration of church and state here. Unfortuantly There are however, those who wish to remove those boundries, hopefully they never do, or we will be no better then a country like Iran )