MARCH 26, THURSDAY

IRAN

I have been briefly in Iran twice in my life, once for a few days and once for a few hours in the airport. Each time I detected a sense of things being out of the ordinary. The first time was when Iran was still under the Shah. In the offices I was visiting I asked for a place to stay. I was told that one of their drivers had a place where I could stay. I knew from my India experience that if you had a car and a driver, my father did, that the driver was a servant who was poorly paid. This driver had a two story house and a swimming pool and a nice guest room. Something was out of kilter. A year later came the Islamic revolution partly a revolution between the rural, fundamentalist religious poor and the secular rich awash in oil money from which my driver somehow benefitted.

The second time was after the revolution when whatever airline I and group of Americans were flying to India on stopped briefly in Tehran. Our group was locked in a windowless, hot room, for the entirelty of our hours long layover, never knowing what was going on. This was after the revolution.

Since then Iran has often been in the news, always as an enemy, usually described as being evil. And for all of that time, the USA has been described by Iran as being an evil empire against which Iran has been fighting back through proxies around the Middle East.

It seems to me that is what is happening today. Fundamentalist Moslem Iran feels that its values are being threatened by a secular West that again and again has intervened in Iranian affairs and is doing so again today. And the ironic thing is that in the secular West it is Jewish fundamentalist Israel and Christian fundamental nationalists in the USA that are leading the charge against fundamentalist Iran.

While the war appears to be over oil, it seems to me that the war is really over which culture is right and which culture is a threat. In the end that was the issue in Afghanistan in which the fundamentalist Taliban turned out to outlast the secular Russians and then the secular Americans. Fundamentalist religion seems to be more resiliant and powerful than powerful technology, advanced bombers and missiles, which should be warning to Trump and Hegseth and their excursion into Iran.