"It's a pity they both can't lose," is usually attributed to Henry Kissinger in relation to the Iran-Iraq War. I have no doubt that he said it, but it is far too obvious never to have been uttered before the 1980s. I find it inexhaustibly apt. Also very useful is John Prescott's, "It's like going into McDonald's and ordering lobster thermidor. It would be nice to have it, but it's not on the menu." And so to Iran again.
There are three items on that menu. One is the absolute monarchy of a man who has barely been there, and of his dynasty whose only connection to two and half millennia of Persian civilisation was to have overthrown it a mere 101 years ago. The second is the present regime, whose version of velayat-e faqih was even more recent and self-serving than the pretensions of the Pahlavis, and whose fall would no more kill off Islamism than that of the Soviet Union killed off Marxism. And the third is the Islamo-Marxist terrorism of Saddam Hussein's old collaborators in the Mojahedin-e-Khalq. It's a pity they can't all lose.
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