* Persian puzzle. When I was in Iran back in 1999, I remember leaving with this impression: We can work with these people. Yes, this government is an ideological outlier with terrorist proxies all around the Middle East. But the people, except for some hard-core clerics in Qum, were uniformly welcoming and hardly anti-American.
The population, notably the teeming, busy city of Tehran, is young, educated and not exactly enamored of living in an sectarian police state where holding hands in public can bring more than brow-arching censure. Incidentally, more than half of their higher-education students are female–and, no, the most popular major is not Islamic Studies. This isn’t a “stan” country or Saudi Arabia. And behind closed doors, it can look–and sound–downright middle class and Western.
They’re not Arabs, but Persians. They don’t speak Arabic, but Farsi. It’s a point of pride that is pointed out. A lot.
When I saw those wire photos of Iranians taking to the streets to celebrate their country’s nuclear deal, my first thought of an appropriate caption was: “Yea, we can buy stuff!”
For Iranians, this was about national pride, of course, but the bottom line is really the bottom line: This is more about economic sanctions than centrifuges and uranium stockpiles. This is about a consumer society that is increasingly restive about what it knows of the outside world–and what unnecessary hardships it has had foisted upon them. Hardships that have more to do with geopolitics than Allah.
Ultimately, we can work with these people.
* Greek Tragi-comedy. Compared to its Western European counterparts in the EC, Greece must comes across as an economic Parthenon-entity. It needs bailouts to bridge to the next bailout. Slovenia never looked so solvent.
When it comes to recently elected Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his left-wing Syriza Party, an immutable rule of governance is reinforced. You can run on thumbing your nose at the austerity crowd and call a pep-rally referendum to show the eurozoners a thing or two. But it ultimately comes down to this: It’s a lot easier to run for office than it is to run a government.