Another way Iran is like Brezhnevian USSR

ARTICLE: Huge cost of Iranian brain drain, By Frances Harrison, BBC News, January 8, 2007.

Fascinating. According to the IMF, out of 90 countries it recently examined, Iran has the biggest brain drain going on. Informal estimates of students taking exams designed to facillitate their departure suggests a dramtic increase since Ahmadinejad came to power in 05.

Sound like a country on the rise? Or--again--does it remind you of late Brezhnevian USSR?

Thanks to Bryan Wilson for sending this in.

Comments

[Nadine Carroll]

Sound like a country on the rise? Or--again--does it remind you of late Brezhnevian USSR?

And if Iran is like late Brezhnevian USSR, is that supposed to be reassuring? If Iran feels itself weakening, will that make it more or less likely to lash out or seek to divert its people's dissatisfactions to some external scapegoat?

[TM Lutas]

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. The problem is how it rhymes. The optimists look and see a mutated Brezhnevian brain drain. The pessimists see the same facts and see a mutated Stalinist brain drain. Same facts, vastly different implications. But the argument is ultimately unsatisfying.

I think that arguing brain drain is "angels on a pin" stuff, interesting but ultimately not useful because it's too far removed from the ultimately interesting question, whether the guy whose finger will be on the button when Iran gets its first nuke is going to light it off and start the first nuclear war (ie the first war to go nuclear where both sides have nukes). That's really what has everybody worried. And brain drain levels won't tell you that. People ran away from Stalin's USSR at least as fast as they ran away from Brezhnev's. There were precious few true believers in the time of the Terror.

The brain drain accelerates or retards progress in the decomposition of the Khomeinist enterprise so it is not entirely unimportant. But labeling it Brezhnevian is not an exercise in timing. It is an exercise in trying to identify whether we have an enraged lion or a sick jackal on our hands. And that question is not going to get resolved by analyzing emigration numbers.

[Tom Barnett]

TM , you're dissecting your own straw men again.

It's a data point, not a dissertation.

And comparing Iran to Stalin's time is a weird, ahistorical stretch. Stalin killed the equivalent of Iran's entire population. Iran, at its worst, has never come anywhere achieving Stalinism, and sure isn't heading there now.

The Hitler stuff is bad enough history without invoking Stalinism.

There's no need to try that hard.

The Brezhnev comparison is debatable, but the way people are trying to elevate Ahmadinejad is getting unreal.