Iran is not the puritanical Islamist state you think; it's worse than that, corrupt and immoral. The mullahs are on the take and there is a growing scandal of coerced prostitution (sex slavery in the modern parlance). But the social ills are not adequately covered yet in the West. We avert our eyes.
Iran today is overwhelmingly "young" and students are mostly alienated from the government, and not only from President Ahmadinejad, but also from the mullah puppeteers above him.
Here are some remarkable photos by Mehdi Gasemi, taken of demonstrations on December 6 ("Student Day" in Iran). Funny, I don't see any "Death to America" posters.
Why is our government so uninterested in helping the dissidents? Are we we afraid of a regime that already is implacably opposed to us? Would we rather let Iran's rulers build a nuclear bomb and then bomb the sites, starting a major war?
Even in the Cold War, when the Soviets were sponsoring anti-American groups in this country, we did all we could to aid dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. Why is Iran different? Please don't tell me the dissidents don't want or need help from us. Who says so--and in what context?
