| |
|
"Popular uprising?" With what? That 1953 "uprising" was a military coup and it almost didn't come off. Iran looks almost like two countries--one theocracy and one limited parliamentary state. Church ultmately trumps state there, but there's enough political sense to support a progressive faction. Khatami has a little leeway but the clerics undercut him by proxy, arresting liberal journalists and academics etc. Clinton at least tried to encourage him and his faction by making peace overtures. Bush isn't interested at all. Iran helps the radical Palestinians because a) the Palestinians are fellow Arabs after all and b) they'll do anything to nobble the otherwise seemingly unstoppable Israeli hawks.
But I suspect al-Qaeda are well-enough embedded in Arab countries they're pretty hard to root out. At least one faction in any given host country probably support them, even if the government as a whle doesn't. Also, al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups work at such a low level they don't need too much outside help--money, guns and explosives, sure, and those last two aren't hard to come by in the Middle East--overall these groups are low maintenance. They're also as indigeous as Mafia. These factors make them hard to control. The US and Israel, in claiming that somebody can turn these groups on and off like a faucet, are being disingenuous because anyone with a brain realizes this.
The only way a "popular uprising" could possibly succeed would be in a Bay of Pigs-style operation, with an army of mostly exiles landed in some quiet but not too remote corner of the country, supported by US (and UK?) airlifts and bombing. Forget it.
A lot of the above is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I refuse to defer to Stratfor, who're pimping for the hawks under cover of "cold realism." |
|
|
