Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Iran….

I know many of you are dying to hear my opinion on current events, well, your wish is granted. I post over at Nation Building about the current conflict in the Middle East (sort of). I am only tangentially interested in this topic because I’m not ignorant and I am of the opinion that most Americans are, otherwise sentences like this wouldn’t be published in a major opinion magazine:

Iran’s diverse population should be fertile ground for a covert operation. Iran is only 51 percent Persian. Azerbaijanis and Kurds comprise nearly 35 percent of the population. Seventy percent are under 30, and the jobless rate hovers near 20 percent.

The current Supreme Leader of Iran is an ethnic Azeri. Azeris are prominent in the military and in business. They are likely overrepresented in the clerical caste. The original capital of the Safavids, the dynasty which created the modern Shia identity of Iran 500 years ago, was in Tabriz, in the heart of Azeri country. The rulers of Iran up until the 20th century were usually Turkic, and could be argued to have been Azeri. I will admit I don’t know much about the details right now, but when I see blatantly implausible contentions being thrown out there, I smell something rotten….
(see Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World, for a general sense of how well integrated Azeris are into Iranian life today)

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