Tehran is Waging a War

Excerpt from ToThePoint (paid subscription required):

"Just as Time [magazine] says, Tehran is waging a war to split Iraq apart and create a Greater Iran Empire by incorporating Shia Iraq. What the story doesn’t discuss is how suicidally stupid is such an attempt.

Iraq breaking apart will inevitably lead to Iran breaking apart. This is because less than half the people in Iran are Iranian – that is, ethnic Persian.

Note the New York Times story above is about Kurds in Iran – not Iraq. The Kurds are a separate ethnic identity, neither Arab nor Persian nor Turk. There are more than five million Kurds in Iraq (20% of the total population of 26 million) – but there are more than six million Kurds right across the border in Iran (9% of 67 million).

The riots and unrest that the NYT reports have been going on for weeks now confirm that, if Iraqi Kurdistan splits from Iraq, Iranian Kurdistan will very violently split off from Iran and join it. An organization has been formed to do just that: The Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan.

We all know that an independent Iraqi Kurdistan terrifies the Turks, because all of southwest Turkey adjoining Iraq and Iran is Kurdish (14 million or 20% of 70 million), so Turkey would be dismembered. It should terrify the Mullahs in Tehran as well, for it would be only the start of the break-up of Iran.

To Iran’s north along the Caspian Sea is the former Soviet colony and now independent Republic of Azerbaijan. The folks who live here are Azeris, a Turkic people converted to Shia Islam by the Persians and stayed that way even after Czar Alexander I (remember him?) kicked the Persians out of the northern third of Azeri territory.

That northern third is Azerbaijan, with a population of eight million. The southern two-thirds is northwest Iran, inhabited by three times as many Azeris – over 24 million or 36% of the total population of Iran. They hate the Persians as much as the Kurds do, and have now organized a secessionist movement – The South Azerbaijan Liberation Movement (SALM) – to break off northwest Iran to create a Greater Azerbaijan.

Then there are the two million Baluchis in southeast Iran who hate the tyranny of Persian Tehran and want to join Pakistan’s province of Baluchistan, and the three million Turkmen who would like the Iran-Turkmenistan border shifted south to encompass them.

Now let’s add to all these enmities the biggest of all: Shia Arabs (they’re in Iraq) vs. Shia Persians (they’re in Iran). Persians and Arabs hate each other whether Sunni or Shia. Shia Islam began in Iraq, with Karbala and Najaf the most revered pilgrimage sites. The Persian Shias’ attempt to replace them as the Shia holy cities with their city of Qom is despised by Iraqi Shias. There is no way Tehran is going to successfully colonize Shia Iraq.

So if the Mullahs are crazy enough to crank up the Persian Ratchet by going after Shia Iraq, George Bush may be happy to crank it all the way until Iran shatters. As he does so, his message to the Persian people will be whispered into their ears:

“The only way to stop Iran torn asunder is to conduct a democratic revolution and get rid of the Mullah Tyranny before it is too late.”