On 2/4/07, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie:
> It's futile to try to charm the Americans, for they are feckless.
> They couldn't change their own government even if their lives depended
> on it.
blame the "Americans"? _all_ of them are "feckless"? aren't there
class differences? isn't there a more sophisticated analysis of why
the people in the US haven't changed their own government?
Sure there are, but the conclusion is the same. Things might change
in the future, but not in time for Iran.
> The Europeans are better at standing up for their own
> short-term self interests than the Americans, but they don't stand up
> for others -- they never have and never will.
France, Germany, & Turkey opposed Bush's splendid little war (in
different ways). It's true that there was a heavy admixture of
opportunism in these actions, but Iran has to take the friend's their
given.
They are slower to sanction Iran than Washington and Tokyo. Chirac
has a traditional Gaullist instinct which makes him suggest a
different path once in a while, but as soon as he does, he always
backtracks. Either Royal or Sarkozy, whichever gets elected, will be
in all likelihood worse for Iran.
> Iran has as many
> friends as it can conceivably win: Moscow, Beijing, Damascus, Algiers,
> Hizballah, Hamas, and Latin socialists, of which the first four are
> purely motivated by their own national interests. The best friend the
> Iranian people have outside their country, aside from Hizballah, is
> Hugo Chavez, but even Chavez won't stop exporting oil to the USA in
> the event of a US attack on Iran, even though he said he would.
so Iran is sunk?
Iran will survive if the Iranians restructure their economic and
political structures and change their ways of life (consumption
patterns, cultural expectations, etc.) so they can better withstand
the impact of sanctions. Turn sanctions into opportunities to curtail
imports and grow domestic industries. Iran's upper classes have no
stomach for doing anything like that, though. Either the Islamist
left will learn to re-organize poor masses of Iran to overcome
upper-class resistance or Iran will have trouble escaping the fate of
Iraq in a decade or so. The Islamist left have the same trouble
employing all available options to curtail inflation that the Chavez
government does, and in addition the Islamsit left do not enjoy the
hegemony that Chavez and his comrades, who initially came into power
after the country's economy severely deteriorated and polarized and
traditional party duopoly virtually collapsed, do.
> > if people _keep on_
> > struggling, it might have an effect.
<
> It has a little effect. Washington won't nuke Iran, for instance.
> But not very much.
so we should give up?
Do what we can without expecting that it will make any difference in
the short run.
> We've lately seen many examples of regime or behavior change overseas,
> from the Left or Right: Yugoslavia, Ukraine, France, and so on. Try
> that.
are you favoring the Blanquist putsch strategy to change the regime?
or is a long-term organizing effort needed?
None of the examples above can be called a putsch. That's a word more
appropriate for what the Free Officers Movements did in Egypt (in
1952) and Iraq (in 1958), for instance. Iran is the only country that
had real social revolutions in the Middle East.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
