You’re right that there’s a symbolic element : it was after all the switch from pounds to dollars as the oil-invoicing currency that marked sterling’s effective demise as a world reserve currency; but that came after the fact, not before.

Washington’s freedom to exchange dollar notes for oil-imports while running ever-increasing deficits is not a fact of nature. And this time, should another oil price-hike precipitate recession, there’s no guarantee that recycled petro-dollars would provide a cushion for the US economy.

I don’t buy the idea that Iranian popular sentiment was gradually moving towards the West; that’s the hope we entertained before the recent elections. Iran may be more polarised now, but that doesn’t mean that the liberals are winning.

Bentegeat is right about the insanity of a nuclear attack on Iran. As for incapacitating the hardened, dispersed, defended, redundant sites in Iranian population centres, I think our conventional technology can cope (the GBU-28 for instance). Sure, the economic repercussions would be dramatic, the cost in terms of Islamic hearts and minds would be huge, and there’s a very widespread feeling amongst westerners that it would be completely unjustified.

But let’s be frank and admit we’re talking about an act of war to preserve our longer-term ability to bully oil-producers, (rather than being bullied by them) and ask ourselves how essential that ability is to the prosperity and well-being of our children. But when we do so, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of national leaders whose duty it is to protect the national interest.

A no-win situation? Looks that way. I just don’t see how the US can tolerate an Iran with a nuclear deterrent.

Bluntly spoken, so what? By going democratic Iran will not stop wanting to dominate the gulf. You are operating on the false presumption that having nuclear weapons and controlling the world’s largest oil producing region is an outlandish project pushed through against national interest and popular will by a deranged dictator.
Democracy is not a magic cure.

I think, Rupert, you’ve missed the point. I don’t think Europe was pulling anyone out of anything. Internal dynamics inside Iran itself were doing this. We were, if you like, using carrots rather than sticks. Up to last summer visible progress was being made.

Indeed Iranian government policies in and of themselves were working this way. Take public education, particularly for girls.Iranian girls were spending far more years in school in 2004 than they had been 20 years earlier. The sex ratio of university students changed significantly during the 1990s in favour of girls. In 1998, around 52 per cent of university students entering government universities were girls. This figure increased to 57 per cent in 1999, to around 60 per cent in 2000, and then to around 62 percent in 2001. This process was having a considerable impact on the improved social status of women (something similar can be observed in Turkey btw). Indeed, a central feature of the process of social change in Iranian society was the fact that girls were staying in education longer, delaying marriage marriage, and taking more responsibility for their own reproductive decisions, and obviously as a result having less children. Far less than Iraq for example. Modernisation was occuring. Having democracy work in Iran was a viable project (something which I doubt it is in Iraq: incidentally wouldn’t the extensive US personell in Iraq and Saudi be put to much better long-term effect promoting an increased circulation of condoms?).

In Iran many such policies were working, nudged along, if you like, by our patient prodding and diplomacy. And then bang, someone somewhere-else got impatient, became arrogant, and dreamed up a huge social engineering project to destabilise an entire region.

Now we all have to face the consequences.

How does the gambler’s song go?

Now ev’ry gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep.
’cause ev’ry hand’s a winner and ev’ry hand’s a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.

But there you are constructing an association that does not exist. Violence is not necessarily stupid, nor the other way round. A preference for negotiation is good, as war is expensive in blood and treasure. But too often in Europe, you don’t see a preference for negotiation, but an automatic, mindless rejection of war. Which is just, well, mindless. Just remember the first Gulf War.

I think bringing Iran out of the dark ages was doable. But then in April 2003 something happened, something which changed everything.

It would be very surprising to me if there were only one form of organistaion of state and society that is competitive in the modern world. There isn’t only dark and light, there are colors. Assuming otherwise smacks of hubris.

Now as for fascism, an islamist state is a bad candidate. It will always be forced to grant a choice between conversion and dhimmi status, assuming that worst comes to worst. If you want to see infant fascism go north from Tehran, and yes, this time it might survive.

Possibly the best explanation ever of the dynamics of revolutions and the behaviour of masses. I remember vaguely something Dostoevsky wrote somewhere: It is the duty of the masses to be conservative and resist change. It is the duty of the elite to move the masses to change and progress.

Once you get the, normally indifferent/conservative, masses moving… anything can happen. And it is difficult to control a juggernaut once it is rolling at full speed.

If you are a leader (whatever kind) who succeeds in getting the masses move, you better make sure they are headed in the right direction.

Well I don’t agree with you LuckyLucky, but you do, possibly inadvertently, raise an interesting, and deeply problematic question. If we look at the whole of ‘western’ or indeed world history, we will indeed find no end of brutal wars fought brutally. In this case, however,I prefer to look forwards and not backwards.

However, WWII is a very interesting case.

Let me say something provocative: perhaps the ’saving grace’ of nazism is that it was such an explosive cocktail of energy and emotions (hat-tip here for those for whom this means anything to Michel Leiris and George Bataille) that it went onto an ‘uncontrolable path’ (rather like modern China’s export and investment circle) from which there was no way out except invasion and war.

If you shake the champagne bottle hard enough, and remove your thumb, the effect is inevitable, if you follow me.

I say ’saving grace’, not because I wish to belittle in any way what happened to all those killed in the holocaust, but because it was precisely this dynamic which meant it came up against a hard rock, and eventually was ended.

That this is not a necessary evolution for fascism, let alone for dictatorship, is shown by cases like Mussolini and Franco (to name but some). Mussolini came to an unfortunate end because he stupidly got involved with Herr Hitler, Franco (who had more gut cunning in this sense) didn’t, and died in his bed, may I remind you, in 1975.

Now why is all this important?

Well lets fast forward 70 or so years to the latest group of countries which are somewhere near the doorsteps of modernity, places like Iran and Iraq.

Iran was evolving nicely away from authoritarian dictatorship. Those who laugh at us ‘euroweenies’ and our patience and penchant for resolving problems with our brains rather than our fists miss something important here, IMHO. I think bringing Iran out of the dark ages was doable. But then in April 2003 something happened, something which changed everything.

Now Iran is on a different course, and this time it is one which may not follow the Franco/Saddam model. This time they may come first* for the Zoroastrians and then for the Kurds, but the cocktail does seem to be explosive, and lead outwards. This, unfortunately, is why it is not simply a ‘mere detail’ that Iran will have nuclear weapons.

“First they came for the communists…”
Martin Niemöller

This one of most strange things usually said. Almost border in irrational and shows clearely a narcisistic West always looking to it’s mirror image and scrambles with identity problems when gives up the Italian suit and has to change to Worker uniform…
Read the 2nd Wold War stories about Allies…

Now the West doesnt want to win the Wars. We see that with Israel. It isnt it’s priority . Apply that present policy to 2WWar or whole Western History and imagine the results.