Berube weighs in

[Dennis Perrin]

> The US and western allies made sure through their
> authoritarian surrogate regimes that all aspiring progressives,
> socialists, nationalists, and even vaguely positive reform movements
> were crushed---hence absurdities like the Shah or later Saddam. Now
> pump all that history back into the one marginally safe way to express
> revolt, the religious schools and Mosques, where the only acceptable
> form of revolt and expression had to be channelled through a religious
> tradition into the authoritarian militancy of an Islamic Jihad,
> etc.... Al-Qaeda obviously represents some deeply degraded form of
> that impulse. And there is the Iranian revolution to point to, that
> started in a very similar way within Mosques, schools, and religious
> social hierarchies, and used coalitions with vaguely progressive
> elements to topple the Shah...


> Chuck Grimes

I agree about Western support for anti-progressive Arab states, but let's
not leave out the old SU which backed Assad's Syria, a state soaked in
plenty of blood itself.

The mullahs may have had some connection to Iranian leftists opposed to the
Shah (and recall that some of the Western sectarian groups hailed the
Ayatollah as "revolutionary"), but don't forget that Iranian fundamentalists
worked with US and British intelligence in toppling Mossedegh and helped put
the Shah in power in the first place. And, for a time, the Shah threw more
crumbs to the mullahs than he did his secular opposition. That they
eventually turned against him and replaced him with a theocratic state may
have been a "degraded" part of their revolution, but when did their
revolution begin -- when they helped the Shah grab state power?

DP