Yah, Yah, Yah

     So I guess we blew up the Ayatollah, or maybe the Israelis did -- of course, he was like 86 and they were shopping for a new one already, and while many of the people of Iran may be delighted he's gone, his replacement is likely to be more of the same, or worse.

     Bear in mind that the West bears most of the responsibility for the hostile, inward-looking nature of the Iranian government: we'd stuck the Shah in place after U. S. and British oil interests had freaked out when the country shambled itself into a left-leaning government in the 1950s that wanted to nationalize their oil businesses.  The Shah dug in like a tick on an elephant and began to live large on oil money, with his very own secret police doing secret-police things, and the same Iranians who'd opted for that scary socialist government (at a time when the Soviet Union could still make a compelling case for rapid industrialization under a command economy -- they had excellent PR for a few decades, especially in the Third World) came to resent it, and their religious nationalists particularly resented it.  By the time things went bang, they were thoroughly pissed off at anyone who wasn't them, and it was in that mood the government of present-day Iran was formed.

     They don't like anybody, and the vast majority of the present-day population has grown up knowing most of their neighbors don't much like them.  If anyone's thinking there's going to be a rapid pro-Western realignment among the gen. pop. while the government folds...think again.  We might see some serious chaos; we might see the most hard-nosed hardliners claw their way to the top, or a floundering government of second- and third-rankers, but the good ol' days of the good ol' Shah aren't coming back and attempts to jam a new Shah into the socket are liable to backfire.

     You can't do any nation-building from bomb-dropping altitude, no matter how high you can make the rubble bounce.