From Professor’s Classroom:

Th analysis of the recent Iranian elects bring home the fact that there are two Irans.  One is the old farts of the 1979 Revolution and the fundamentalists and two, the young…students, intelllectuals, middle class and the tech savvy.

Two Irans?  Yes….we have the old farts from the days of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the young, the students, middle class, etc.  But what of the “middle age” Iranians?

Middle aged Iranians…..well there is a sticking point…why?….there are NOT many in Iran that are middle aged.  How can that be preofessor, you may ask?

That is a story unto itself……about the time that the ayatollah was coming to power in Iran in 1979…there was another despot coming to power…..one Saddam in Iraq.  In the year 1980 there were intrigues on both sides of the border between Iran and Iraq….Iraq fired one of the first shots of a coming war.  Saddam was afraid that the Shia in Iraq would rise up with Iran’s help and Saddam was after the oil fields in western Iran.  And thus began a bloody and costly war that lasted from 1980 to 1988.  The war could have been named “the battle of the despots”.

Now back to the middle aged Iranians.  The lack of a substantial group of Iranians know as “middle aged” is a direct result of a tactic employed during the war with Iraq, it was know as the Basji or the “human wave”.

The “human wave” was children in white burial garments that were tied together and sent into battle, unarmed, they would lead the Revolutionary Guard…they were used to clear mine fields and act as canon fodder against the Iraqis.  Thousands upon thousands of Iranian children died.

So yes, there are two Irans…the old and the young…….the old revolutionaries from the 1979 gig and the young who are the students, intellectuals, the middle class….the young, who want a more modern western existence.  These the ones that are fighting in the streets now…just as their old fart predecessors did some 30 years ago.  A full circle.