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/ne...8&imageid=&cap=

[STEED]

Predictable piece of news.

[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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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]

Originally Posted by Ducimus

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.