A very enlightening article.

My only reservations are these:

1. What evidence do you have that 90% of the Iranian electorate would vote to evict the Clerics from office?

2. What evidence do you have that “the Iranians” want a “secular democracy”? Isn’t that what the Iraqi exiles claimed? – and we ended up with another Islamic State – more Islamic in fact than the one it replaced. I’m sure we all remember the optimists telling us how the Iraqi’s would welcome their ‘liberators’!

3. Your entire thesis seems to rest on the assumption that the Iranians, or at least the vast majority of them (90%), no longer want to be Muslims, or perhaps want to remain ‘Muslims’ in name only, free of the strictures imposed by Allah Himself. That is quite a remarkable assumption on which to build a foreign policy, and, it seems to me, not that dissimilar to the arguments advanced by previous US administrations to impose the Shah on the Iranian people, which created this problem (as you call it) in the first place.

I do think that any policy which rests on the assumption that Muslims would prefer to ‘submit’ to a secular style ‘democracy’ rather then submitting to the “will of Allah” must be backed up by considerably more evidence than the say-so of opposition groups with a lot to gain from US assistance to help install them in power.

Joseph BH McMillan http://www.freedomvrights.com