> What amazes me is how American
> commentators and their parrots so casually and publicly use the same
> rhetoric about the Sadrists that Saddam and his Baathist apparatus
> doubtless did. Is our bloody talk less vile because we can rent DVDs in
> peace?
My own theory is that there's a double disavowal going on here: just as Baathism is the distorted mirror image of Bushism, so too is Saadrism the distorted mirror image of US fundamentalism.
I was just thinking of this in a different context, when I read an impossibly bad book on the Iranian economy, basically a standard neolib text which condemned the mullahs for failing to be Wall Street brokers, while containing not one iota of actual information about the place. It was written mostly by emigre Iranians, who landed plush sinecures in the US and UK, and who are trotted out in best Cold War tradition as the true avatars of "Iranian democracy". (The numberless victims of SAVAK's torture-cells would beg to differ.)
One thing: Iran has gradually built up a huge auto industry, it may produce nearly 1 million cars this year alone (it built only 89,000 in 1989). There's nothing like it anywhere else in Central Asia - Turkey produces a few hundred thousand cars, I think, but has little indigenous production. Sheds an interesting light on Kiarostami's road epics, no? Evidently theocracy is just another import-substitution strategy.
Incidentally, this is another incentive for the EU and East Asia to resist Mordor. It stands to make a bundle of euros/yen/won/yuan by selling machine-tools, software and auto tech to energy-rich Central Asian countries, trying to build their own industrial base.
-- DRR