On Oct 27, 2007, at 6:04 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
> One difference I can see is that I don't
> spend any time volunteering criticism of the IR, and disengage
> very quickly from any in-depth discussion of how good or bad
> they are.
It's sort of hard to avoid, isn't it? Iran is an important, complicated, and interesting country, and has been for a long time. Why shouldn't we be interested in talking about important, complicated, and interesting countries? God knows people talked about the USSR over & over for its entire lifespan and beyond, and we never had much influence over its domestic structures. And it was the mortal enemy of the U.S. for decades. It would have been very weird to duck any conversation of what the USSR was like at any time from 1917 to 1991, wouldn't it? And how could you resist? It was a very compelling place.
Doug