Trego's Mountain Ear

I was young when the ayatollahs took Iran from the Shah. He was a sick man, and he ruled through the secret police – Savak, I think they were called, though I don’t recall what the word meant or the letters stood for. I’ve been surprised that his son, Reza Pahlavi (the second, or junior, or whatever way they have of telling father from son when they share the same name in Iran) has managed to become a contender for the throne. The Savak dudes were pretty rough, and there’s a long association between the Savak and the Pahlavi family. The other contender is Maryam Rajavi and the People’s Mujahedin. Since neither Reza nor Maryam is an ayatollah or a mullah, I figure that so long as the Islamic Republic fails, the successor should be an improvement. Rajavi’s past 70, and was one of the student leaders who worked to remove the shah.

I’m thinking that Pahlavi might be the better of the two – but either way, we would be looking at an Iran that would probably step out of being the world’s largest financier of terror operations. Definitely a chance for a better world.

It’s interesting to note that two-thirds of Iran’s mosques are empty after 47 years as an Islamic Republic, and how many have been torched in the past month or so. It looks to me as if an educated population becomes more secular after they have lived under a theocracy.

So hopefully the mullahs will go down, and some more moderate muslim rulers will step on stage. The mullahs have pretty well bankrupt and dewatered the country, so whoever takes over is going to have his or her hands full fixing the country.