My apologies for posting so many things in different posts; it keeps coming to me in random spurts and I have been working 14 hour days while juggling two summer classes. Every free moment, my conscience sorts out fragmented thoughts and I have new…“material.”
What I find really interesting is the approach in “containing” a country.
Populist leaders tend to be dangerous because the supporting population is usually the MAJORITY population, demographic-wise.
Ahmadinejad is (was?) popular because the majority of Iran are working class poor. Literally, they are “working poor.” The middle class is almost non-existent.
To give you an idea of the economic state over there, consider that their currency is the Rial, and every 10 Rials is 1 Toman. Prices are quoted in Rials but everyone deals in “Toman.” It is like printing the price of a meal on the menu in cents but knowing that nobody has “X” hundreds of cents, so dollars are used in transaction.
Now, the current exchange rate is 1000:1 for Tomans:US $.
A pound of beef in Iran is MORE expensive (2-4x) than a pound of beef here. Fruit is more expensive, dairy is more expensive. Many things are. Gas is subsidized, so they pay $0.30 per gallon (nowhere near as clean as fuel here, though).
However, there are apartments in Tehran that are $20 million (yes, in USD). APARTMENTS. Nice, for sure, but that’s more expensive than ANY US city. More expensive than London, even.
People there are poor, but a small crust of people are EXTREMELY wealthy. My cousin has a friend in his late 20s who works for his own father. The family owns a denim factory. The friend is paying RENT on a nice house in Tehran that is $7,000 per MONTH. How is that possible? I don’t know.
Their family pulls in $100k per month from the factory. They also own a villa (mansion?) on one of the Palm Islands that were built near Dubai. The place is 55,000 sq ft (5,000 sq m). There IS money, but it is backed up in the hands of very powerful people and also very corrupt government officials.
Here’s my question:
If you want to HURT a country, instead of placing sanctions that, over time, contribute to the economic despair of millions (in turn providing fertile ground for a populist leader/dictator), why not go for a brain drain?
Why does the US deny visas to the majority of Iranians (my relatives have all tried to get visas. no luck) because we “dont’ want them dern terr’rists in our cun-tree!” ? Shit, SEDUCE their professionals and bright minds. Get them to come over here. Steal their youth, cripple that country’s future. Right?
There are plenty of influential Iranians (and I don’t mean to get prideful, so I apologize if that’s what this sounds like):
Omid Kordestani of Google
Pierre Omidyar of eBay
Christiane Amanpour of CNN, also Rudi Bakhtiar of CNN
Shohreh Aghadashloo, actor
Andre Agassi (yes, he is at least half Iranian)
Houshmandzadeh of the Bengals (now with the Seahawks, I think)
Point being, get the best of the best to leave their homeland and come HERE.
Oh, and for clarification on something:
There is a reason why many Arabs do not like Iranians and it has to due in large part with the fact that many Iranian ex-pats here are secular, because A) they probably came to the US before the Islamic Revolution, which is why the Iranian flags here usually have the lion holding a sabre instead of the Islamic (and current) version with “Allah” in the center, B) Persian culture predates Islam by several thousand years. Many traditions are simply “Persian” traditions and not borne out of religion.
If anything, the only true religion, which is a Persian religion and probably the oldest practiced religion to date, is Zoroastrianism.
Many Iranians here are secular and if any tradition bears a semblance of Islam it’s because the tradition is too old to be tossed out, not because we have so many die hard Muslim Iranians.
I’m too tired to coalesce all of the above into a single point, but whatever. What I am trying to say is that all the bullshit you hear on US news about “death to Israel, death to America” is a bunch of post-Revolution hooliganism from the conservatives who were teenagers when the revolution broke out. It’s evaporating nostalgia.
The majority of Iran are UNDER 25 years of age (almost 60%) and are more concerned with…surprise…the same shit the American under-25 demographic is concerned with: Internet, sports, education, and living their own fucking lives.
Nobody is walking around beating his chest wishing he was a “martyr” suicide bomber. His parents would beat the shit out of him and tell him to finish his fucking education. Yes, there are some orphans of the Revolution that the government tried to take care of by giving them a title of law enforcement (Basiji) and a badge, telling them they can harass people to uphold religious law.
My cousin and his neighbors were playing soccer one day in their apartment complex in Esfahan when a 14 yo Basiji rode in on a dirt bike to interrupt their game and shame them for not staying indoors and reading the Qur’an.
What did my cousin and his friends do? They beat the shit out of the kid and took a picture of the “size 46” imprint of a flip flop they used to beat the Basiji kid. Iranians HATE their government but will ignore it as long as the govt does not harass them, which the govt has not done until recently, allowing up to date electronic goods and “fraternizing” to occur in public. They want to appease the masses of youth to keep them quiet, but this election pissed off too many people.
Thankfully, Iran has the most active blogosphere in the world (China is second) which is why everyone is blogging and YouTubing this budding revolution.
Oh, and the Iranian women you see on TV…yes, they are hot, but understand that these are girls who, despite suffocating from tear gas, will walk up to riot police, spit in their face and throw molotov cocktails, kick downed officers and still manage to not smear their own make up in the process. Try marrying that and not taking out the trash one day…and waking up wearing your testicles as earrings.
