http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091019/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran_bombing

On one hand, classic projection from a country that seeds insurgency/terrorist groups throughout the region.

On the other, a great example of why the US was very wise not to publicly support the election protestors last summer – open support for them by our President or Government would have been the card the Iranians needed to crack back even harder against the movement.

I think we need to view everything that’s happening in Iran right now the way a policeman would approach a domestic violence situation – husband might be beating his wife, but if the cop turns his back on the wife while handcuffing husby, he’s likely to get a frying pan to the head from behind.

http://americaspeaksink.com/2009/10/how-obama-lost-reelection-for-the-presidency/

Good journalistic practice demands that you cite the sources of your information. Citing a “conventional” estimate is about as responsible as citing “conventional” wisdom. Even assuming you were citing, say, the CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ir.html), it appears you have confused figures for ethnic groups with figures for languages in the following statement: “Persian speakers make up only about half the population. (51% is the conventional estimate.) Iran is much more Shiite (over 80% at least) than it is Persian.”

According to the Library of Congress Federal Research Division (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Iran.pdf), 65 percent of the Iranian population is ethnically Persian and at least 90 percent of Iranians are Shia. Furthermore, “Persian, the official language, is spoken as a mother tongue by at least 65 percent of the population and as a second language by a large proportion of the remaining 35 percent.”

You have materially misstated the ethnic and language divides in Iran to support a thesis which is itself flawed. Iran is no less a nation-state than the United States. You argue that Iran is unstable because it has the kind of population diversity that makes the U.S. a much-celebrated melting pot of people of different races and backgrounds. One might just as well argue that the U.S. was built as a “multiethnic empire.” I am mystified why you focus on ethnic, linguistic and religious differences as a source of instability in Iran rather than on the ideological and socio-economic differences that are so much more potent as an internal threat to the continuation of the current regime. Iran’s ethnic, linguistic and religious differences are no more destabilizing there than those same types of differences are destabilizing here in the U.S., unless you worry about, say, a Latino, Catholic, Spanish-speaking minority mounting a velvet revolution.

NO ONE ever claimed that the U.S. was a homogeneous nation state. Every schoolchild learns that we are not.

The point David Frum was trying to make, was strategic: Perhaps the non-Persians will destabilize the Persian regime in Tehran someday.

I wouldn’t count on it.

How about Sweden? Really? Look it up.

I think there is a fair amount of unconscious racism hidden in the proposition that Iran is not a homogenous nation-state, in other words, like us.

Iran is not a homogeneous nation state.

Persians comprise only about half the population.

The remainder are:

Azeri 24%, Gilaki and Mazandarani 8%, Kurd 7%, Arab 3%, Lur 2%, Baloch 2%, Turkmen 2%, other 1%

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/countrytemplate_ir.html