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Comment by adamiscool8 | Hacker News Reader

Even as we speak, Ayatollah Razmara and his cadre of fanatics are consolidating their power!

It’s Ayatollah Rubio.

Even as we speak Israeli missiles are target at him.

Maybe .. the revolutionary guard is fed up though with ineffective empire rule? Like to be rubbed in the dirt face first repeatetly as inheritor of the mighty persian empire sucks bad enough, to reconsider the way things are run? Sorry, but whatever israel & the us are doing, seems to work way better than - whatever has happened the last decades in iran?

As I understand it, the IGRC doesn't particularly rub happily with the clerical council, and it's not entirely clear to me who will win that the power struggle.

But the ultimate loser of the power struggle is clear: the Iranian populace at large, as all of the viable factions are quite committed to consolidating their power by repressing the population. The most likely situation, I think, looks a lot like Libya.

Islamic societies seem to be unable to form stable institutions. The recipe seems to be unable to synthesize this, no matter how many ressources are available and how benign the conditions. As a result the biggest formable state-institution remains the family clan and the family clan just does not cut it in preventing civil war. At best you get a clan-coalition masquerading as a military government with some democratic pets - at worst you get libya.But i guess after 52 countries, the results are in and the fact that other - non western powers are colonizing islamic countries now (china, russia) and everyone is scrambling for nukes post trump - the displayed weaknesses could end the region.

How about Indonesia?

“ the biggest formable state-institution remains the family clan”

This is not at all how Irani society is structured.

The rest of your comments generalizations are weak and ill-supported as well, at best they only apply to a subset of Arab countries in the Middle East.

The Ottoman Empire lasted 600 years with only one major civil war, a feat not matched by any major Christian European country. England faced 3½ civil wars (counting the Hundred Years War as a ½ civil war here, because while it is essentially a dynastic dispute, it's not a dynastic dispute over England itself but rather English holdings in France) in the same timeframe. And this despite the Ottoman successor law being essentially "battle royale among eligible candidates" whereas standard European succession by this time is the seemingly clear "eldest son" yet somehow creating endless succession disputes.

Those "battle royales" were the reason for the stability. The process selected for sultans (or, occasionally, mothers of sultans) who were most effective at building a backing coalition, and generally ended in the killing or at least exile of all pretenders to the throne. The disruption the process represented also helped quell the willingness of factions within the government to try and repeat it too often.

The well-established succession processes practiced in the West guaranteed that at any given time, not only was there almost always at least one person who would benefit directly from the ruler's demise, there were often individuals for whom the ruler's premature demise was required for them to be inline for the throne. If you're the King's brother, for example, under male-preference primogeniture you need to make sure your brother doesn't have any kids.

Where did you hear that? The IRGC is the creation of the revolutionary clerical movement. It exists specifically to prevent outcomes like Egypt, where a powerful national armed service operates as a check on political Islam.

For those who don't get the joke:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpEF6QPSVJE

Replying authoritatively to a Simpsons quote betrays you.

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