Word: vaste
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...Bush holds the high cards. Even if Democrats were able to peel off a dozen or more Republicans in the Senate and adopt a measure requiring a deployment on a specific timetable - and that's a big if - the vast majority of House Republicans are unlikely ever to break ranks and support such a plan. So Bush has little to fear from the Democrats, for all their promises to change course on the war. And there's a bonus in this for the President as well: if a close vote makes it to the floor of the Senate, Bush...
...Guard's economic clout is neither new nor troublesome. Iran's constitution authorizes the military to play a peacetime economic role, and with the extensive engineering resources it amassed during the eight-year war with Iraq, it is only fitting, the thinking goes, for the Guard to run a vast financial empire reputedly worth billions of dollars. But to reformists, the Guard is to blame for the poor performance of Iran's economy, as well as its tattered relations with the international community. "There are elements within the IRGC [the acronym for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] that operate like...
...Even conceding the case for a military draft, there is a problem. The problem is that the military has no use for more than a small fraction of draft-age men and women. So if you are going to piggyback some vast national service plan on the military's need for relatively few recruits, what do you do with the rest of them? There are, it seems to me, just three possibilities: give them useful jobs that someone else is already doing; give them useful jobs that currently are not being done; or give them make-work jobs...
...subsidies on basic foodstuffs have helped. High oil prices enabled this largesse. But oil's munificence is not limitless. The government, nervous that the West may impose sanctions on Iran's gasoline imports as punishment for its controversial nuclear activities, recently withdrew its subsidy of gasoline. Despite its vast oil reserves, Iran cannot produce sufficient gasoline to meet consumption, so in June the government imposed rationing. For days, gas stations saw long queues at all hours. On the way home from a dinner party the first night of the rationing, we were stuck in a three-hour traffic...
...back then was that George W. Bush had labeled Iran part of an "axis of evil," and when the rhetoric cooled, the regime resumed trying to placate its angry young people. Watching from afar, I will be eager to see how a hard-line government will woo back the vast middle class, alienated by the imposition of a more Islamic social order. In Isfahan angry citizens reportedly burned police buses used to round up flouters of "Islamic" dress. In Shiraz 2,000 university students demonstrated against new dress restrictions. It's hard to see how Ahmadinejad and his supporters will...