By Robert D. Kaplan | Stratfor
September 5, 2012
The most important facts about Iran go unstated because they are so
obvious. Any glance at a map would tell us what they are. And these
facts explain how regime change or evolution in Tehran -- when, not if,
it comes -- will dramatically alter geopolitics from the Mediterranean
to the Indian subcontinent and beyond.
Virtually all of the Greater Middle East's oil and natural gas lies
either in the Persian Gulf or the Caspian Sea regions. Just as shipping
lanes radiate from the Persian Gulf, pipelines will increasingly radiate
from the Caspian region to the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, China and
the Indian Ocean. The only country that straddles both energy-producing
areas is Iran, stretching as it does from the Caspian to the Persian
Gulf. In a raw materials' sense, Iran is the Greater Middle East's
universal joint.
The Persian Gulf possesses by some accounts 55 percent of the world's
crude oil reserves, and Iran dominates the whole Gulf, from the Shatt
al-Arab on the Iraqi border to the Strait of Hormuz 990 kilometers (615
miles) away. Because of its bays, inlets, coves and islands -- excellent
places for hiding suicide, tanker-ramming speed boats -- Iran's
coastline inside the Strait of Hormuz is 1,356 nautical miles; the next
longest, that of the United Arab Emirates, is only 733 nautical miles.
Iran also has 480 kilometers of Arabian Sea frontage, including the port
of Chabahar near the Pakistani border. This makes Iran vital to
providing warm water, Indian Ocean access to the landlocked Central
Asian countries of the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Iranian coast
of the Caspian in the far north, wreathed by thickly forested
mountains, stretches for nearly 650 kilometers from Astara in the west,
on the border with former Soviet Azerbaijan, around to Bandar-e Torkaman
in the east, by the border with natural gas-rich Turkmenistan.
A look at the relief map shows something more. The broad back of the
Zagros Mountains sweeps down through Iran from Anatolia in the northwest
to Balochistan in the southeast. To the west of the Zagros range, the
roads are all open to Iraq. When the British area specialist and travel
writer Freya Stark explored Lorestan in Iran's Zagros Mountains in the
early 1930s, she naturally based herself out of Baghdad, not out of
Tehran. To the east and northeast, the roads are open to Khorasan and
the Kara Kum (Black Sand) and Kizyl Kum (Red Sand) deserts of
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, respectively. For just as Iran straddles
the rich energy fields of both the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, it
also straddles the Middle East proper and Central Asia. No Arab country
can make that claim (just as no Arab country sits astride two
energy-producing areas). In fact, the Mongol invasion of Iran, which
killed hundreds of thousands of people at a minimum and destroyed the
qanat irrigation system, was that much more severe precisely because of
Iran's Central Asian prospect.
Iranian influence in the former Soviet republics of the Caucasus and
Central Asia is potentially vast. Whereas Azerbaijan on Iran's
northwestern border contains roughly 8 million Azeri Turks, there are
twice that number in Iran's neighboring provinces of Azerbaijan and
Tehran. The Azeris were cofounders of the first Iranian polity since the
seventh century rise of Islam. The first Shiite Shah of Iran (Ismail in
1501) was an Azeri Turk. There are important Azeri businessmen and
ayatollahs in Iran, including current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei himself. The point is that whereas Iran's influence to the west
in nearby Turkey and the Arab world has been well established by the
media, its influence to the north and east is equally profound; and if
the future brings less repressive regimes both in Iran and in the
southern, Islamic tier of the former Soviet Union, Iran's influence
could deepen still with more cultural and political interactions.
There is, too, what British historian Michael Axworthy calls the
"Idea of Iran," which, as he explains, is as much about culture and
language as about race and territory.1 Iran, he means, is a
civilizational attractor, much like ancient Greece and China were,
pulling other peoples and languages into its linguistic orbit: the
essence of soft power, in other words. Dari, Tajik, Urdu, Pashtu, Hindi,
Bengali and Iraqi Arabic are all either variants of Persian, or
significantly influenced by it. That is, one can travel from Baghdad in
Iraq to Dhaka in Bangladesh and remain inside a Persian cultural realm.
Iran, furthermore, is not some 20th century contrivance of family and
religious ideology like Saudi Arabia, bracketed as the Saudi state is
by arbitrary borders. Iran corresponds almost completely with the
Iranian plateau -- "the Castile of the Near East," in Princeton
historian Peter Brown's phrase -- even as the dynamism of its
civilization reaches far beyond it. The Persian Empire, even as it
besieged Greece, "uncoiled, like a dragon's tail ... as far as the Oxus,
Afghanistan and the Indus valley," writes Brown.2 W.
Barthold, the great Russian geographer of the turn of the 20th century,
concurs, situating Greater Iran between the Euphrates and the Indus and
identifying the Kurds and Afghans as essentially Iranian peoples.3
Of the ancient peoples of the Near East, only the Hebrews and the
Iranians "have texts and cultural traditions that have survived to
modern times," writes the linguist Nicholas Ostler.4 Persian
(Farsi) was not replaced by Arabic, like so many other tongues, and is
in the same form today as it was in the 11th century, even as it has
adopted the Arabic script. Iran has a far more venerable record as a
nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world
and all the places in the Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and
Palestine. There is nothing artificial about Iran, in other words: The
very competing power centers within its clerical regime indicate a
greater level of institutionalization than almost anywhere in the region
save for Israel, Egypt and Turkey.
Greater Iran began back in 700 B.C. with the Medes, an ancient
Iranian people who established, with the help of the Scythians, an
independent state in northwestern Iran. By 600 B.C., this empire reached
from central Anatolia to the Hindu Kush (Turkey to Afghanistan), as
well as south to the Persian Gulf. In 549 B.C., Cyrus (the Great), a
prince from the Persian house of Achaemenes, captured the Median capital
of Ecbatana (Hamadan) in western Iran and went on a further bout of
conquest. The map of the Achaemenid Empire, governed from Persepolis
(near Shiraz) in southern Iran, shows antique Persia at its apex, from
the sixth to fourth centuries B.C. It stretched from Thrace and
Macedonia in the northwest, and from Libya and Egypt in the southwest,
all the way to the Punjab in the east; and from the Transcaucasus and
the Caspian and Aral seas in the north to the Persian Gulf and the
Arabian Sea in the south. No empire up to that point in world history
had matched it. Persia was the world's first superpower, and Iranian
leaders in our era -- both the late shah and the ayatollahs -- have
inculcated this history in their bones. Its pan-Islamism
notwithstanding, the current ruling elite is all about Iranian
nationalism.
The Parthians manifested the best of the Iranian genius -- which was
ultimately about tolerance of the cultures over which they ruled,
allowing them a benign suzerainty. Headquartered in the northeastern
Iranian region of Khorasan and the adjacent Kara Kum and speaking an
Iranian language, the Parthians ruled between the third century B.C. and
the third century A.D., generally from Syria and Iraq to central
Afghanistan and Pakistan, including Armenia and Turkmenistan. Thus,
rather than the Bosporus-to-Indus or the Nile-to-Oxus scope of
Achaemenid Persia, the Parthian Empire constitutes a more realistic
vision of a Greater Iran for the 21st century. And this is not
necessarily bad. For the Parthian Empire was extremely decentralized, a
zone of strong influence rather than of outright control, which leaned
heavily on art, architecture and administrative practices inherited from
the Greeks. As for the Iran of today, it is no secret that the clerical
regime is formidable, but demographic, economic and political forces
are equally dynamic, and key segments of the population are restive. So
do not discount the possibility of a new regime in Iran and a
consequently benign Iranian empire yet to come.
The medieval record both cartographically and linguistically follows
from the ancient one, though in more subtle ways. In the eighth century
the political locus of the Arab world shifted eastward from Syria to
Mesopotamia -- that is, from the Umayyad caliphs to the Abbasid ones --
signaling, in effect, the rise of Iran. (The second caliph, Omar bin
al-Khattab, during whose reign the Islamic armies conquered the
Sassanids, adopted the Persian system of administration called the
Diwan.) The Abbasid Caliphate at its zenith in the middle of the ninth
century ruled from Tunisia eastward to Pakistan, and from the Caucasus
and Central Asia southward to the Persian Gulf. Its capital was the new
city of Baghdad, close upon the old Sassanid Persian capital of
Ctesiphon; and Persian bureaucratic practices, which added whole new
layers of hierarchy, undergirded this new imperium. The Abbasid
Caliphate of Baghdad became more a symbol of an Iranian despotism than
of an Arab sheikhdom. Some historians have labeled the Abbasid Caliphate
the equivalent of the "cultural reconquest" of the Middle East by the
Persians under the guise of Arab rulers.5 The Abbasids
succumbed to Persian practices just as the Umayyads, closer to Asia
Minor, had succumbed to Byzantine ones. "Persian titles, Persian wines
and wives, Persian mistresses, Persian songs, as well as Persian ideas
and thoughts, won the day," writes the historian Philip K. Hitti.6 "In
the western imagination," writes Peter Brown, "the Islamic [Abbasid]
empire stands as the quintessence of an oriental power. Islam owed this
crucial orientation neither to Muhammad nor to the adaptable conquerors
of the seventh century, but to the massive resurgence of eastern,
Persian traditions in the eighth and ninth centuries.7"
As for Shiism, it is very much a component of this Iranian cultural
dynamism -- despite the culturally bleak and oppressive aura projected
by the ruling Shiite clergy in these dark times in Tehran. While the
arrival of the Mahdi in the form of the hidden Twelfth Imam means the
end of injustice, and thus acts as a spur to radical activism, little
else in Shiism necessarily inclines the clergy to play an overt
political role; Shiism even has a quietest strain that acquiesces to the
powers that be and that is frequently informed by Sufism.8 Witness
the example set by Iraq's leading cleric of recent years, Ayatollah Ali
Sistani (of Iranian heritage), who only at pivotal moments makes a plea
for political conciliation from behind the scenes. Precisely because of
the symbiotic relationship between Iraq and Iran throughout history,
with its basis in geography, it is entirely possible that in a
post-revolutionary Iran, Iranians will look more toward the Shiite holy
cities of An Najaf and Karbala in Iraq for spiritual direction than
toward their own holy city of Qom. It is even possible that Qom will
adopt the quietism of An Najaf and Karbala. This is despite the profound
differences between Shia of Arab descent and those of Persian descent.
The French scholar Olivier Roy tells us that Shiism is historically
an Arab phenomenon that came late to Iran but that eventually led to the
establishment of a clerical hierarchy for taking power. Shiism was
further strengthened by the tradition of a strong and bureaucratic state
that Iran has enjoyed since antiquity, relative to those of the Arab
world, and that is, as we know, partly a gift of the spatial coherence
of the Iranian plateau. The Safavids brought Shiism to Iran in the 16th
century. Their name comes from their own militant Sufi order, the
Safaviyeh, which had originally been Sunni. The Safavids were merely one
of a number of horse-borne brotherhoods of mixed Turkish, Azeri,
Georgian and Persian origin in the late 15th century that occupied the
mountainous plateau region between the Black and Caspian seas, where
eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus and northwestern Iran come together. In
order to build a stable state on the Farsi-speaking Iranian plateau,
these new sovereigns of eclectic linguistic and geographical origin
adopted Twelver Shiism as the state religion, which awaits the return of
the Twelfth Imam, a direct descendant of Mohammed, who is not dead but
in occlusion.9 The Safavid Empire at its zenith stretched
thereabouts from Anatolia and Syria-Mesopotamia to central Afghanistan
and Pakistan -- yet another variant of Greater Iran through history.
Shiism was an agent of Iran's congealment as a modern nation-state, even
as the Iranianization of non-Persian Shiite and Sunni minorities during
the 16th century also helped in this regard.10 Iran might
have been a great state and nation since antiquity, but the Safavids
with their insertion of Shiism onto the Iranian plateau retooled Iran
for the modern era.
Indeed, revolutionary Iran of the late 20th and early 21st centuries
is a fitting expression of this powerful and singular legacy. Of course,
the rise of the ayatollahs has been a lowering event in the sense of
the violence done to -- and I do not mean to exaggerate -- the
voluptuous, sophisticated and intellectually stimulating traditions of
the Iranian past. (Persia -- "that land of poets and roses!" exclaims
the introductory epistle of James J. Morier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan.11)
But comparison, it is famously said, is the beginning of all serious
scholarship. And compared to the upheavals and revolutions in the Arab
world during the early and middle phases of the Cold War, the regime
ushered in by the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution was striking in its élan
and modernity. The truth is, and this is something that goes directly
back to the Achaemenids of antiquity, everything about the Iranian past
and present is of a high quality, whether it is the dynamism of its
empires from Cyrus the Great to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Who can deny the
sheer Iranian talent for running militant networks in Lebanon, Gaza and
Iraq, which is, after all, an aspect of imperial rule!); or the
political thought and writings of its Shiite clergy; or the complex
efficiency of the bureaucracy and security services in cracking down on
dissidents. Tehran's revolutionary order constitutes a richly developed
governmental structure with a diffusion of power centers; it is not a
crude one-man thugocracy like the kind Saddam Hussein ran in neighboring
Arab Iraq.
Again, what makes the clerical regime in Iran so effective in the
pursuit of its interests, from Lebanon to Afghanistan, is its merger
with the Iranian state, which itself is the product of history and
geography. The Green Movement, which emerged in the course of massive
anti-regime demonstrations following the disputed elections of 2009, is
very much like the regime it seeks to topple. The Greens were greatly
sophisticated by the standards of the region (at least until the Jasmine
Revolution in Tunisia two years later), and thus another demonstration
of the Iranian genius. The Greens constituted a world-class democracy
movement, having mastered the latest means in communications technology
-- Twitter, Facebook, text messaging -- to advance their organizational
throw weight and having adopted a potent mixture of nationalism and
universal moral values to advance their cause. It took all the means of
repression of the Iranian state, subtle and not, to drive the Greens
underground. (In fact, the Iranian regime was far more surgical in its
repression of the Greens than the Syrian regime has thus far been in its
own violent attempt to silence dissent.) Were the Greens ever to take
power, or to facilitate a change in the clerical regime's philosophy and
foreign policy toward moderation, Iran, because of its strong state and
dynamic idea, would have the means to shift the whole groundwork of the
Middle East away from radicalization, providing political expression
for a new bourgeoisie with middle-class values that has been quietly
rising throughout the Greater Middle East, and which the American
obsession with al Qaeda and radicalism obscured until the Arab Spring of
2011.12
To speak in terms of destiny is dangerous, since it implies an
acceptance of fate and determinism, but clearly given Iran's geography,
history and human capital, it seems likely that the Greater Middle East,
and by extension, Eurasia, will be critically affected by Iran's own
political evolution, for better or for worse.
The best indication that Iran has yet to fulfill such a destiny lies
in what has not quite happened yet in Central Asia. Let me explain.
Iran's geography, as noted, gives it frontage on Central Asia to the
same extent that it has on Mesopotamia and the Middle East. But the
disintegration of the Soviet Union has brought limited gains to Iran,
when one takes into account the whole history of Greater Iran in the
region. The very suffix "istan," used for Central and South Asian
countries and which means "place," is Persian. The conduits for
Islamization and civilization in Central Asia were the Persian language
and culture. The language of the intelligentsia and other elites in
Central Asia up through the beginning of the 20th century was one form
of Persian or another. But after 1991, Shiite Azerbaijan to the
northwest adopted the Latin alphabet and turned to Turkey for tutelage.
As for the republics to the northeast of Iran, Sunni Uzbekistan oriented
itself more toward a nationalistic than an Islamic base, for fear of
its own homegrown fundamentalists -- this makes it wary of Iran.
Tajikistan, Sunni but Persian-speaking, seeks a protector in Iran, but
Iran is constrained for fear of making an enemy of the many
Turkic-speaking Muslims elsewhere in Central Asia.13 What's
more, being nomads and semi-nomads, Central Asians were rarely devout
Muslims to start with, and seven decades of communism only strengthened
their secularist tendencies. Having to relearn Islam, they are both put
off and intimidated by clerical Iran.
Of course, there have been positive developments from the viewpoint
of Tehran. Iran, as its nuclear program attests, is one of the most
technologically advanced countries in the Middle East (in keeping with
its culture and politics), and as such has built hydroelectric projects
and roads and railroads in these Central Asian countries that will one
day link them all to Iran -- either directly or through Afghanistan.
Moreover, a natural gas pipeline now connects southeastern Turkmenistan
with northeastern Iran, bringing Turkmen natural gas to Iran's Caspian
region, and thus freeing up Tehran's own natural gas production in
southern Iran for export via the Persian Gulf. (This goes along with a
rail link built in the 1990s connecting the two countries.) Turkmenistan
has the world's fourth-largest natural gas reserves and has committed
its entire natural gas exports to Iran, China and Russia. Hence, the
possibility arises of a Eurasian energy axis united by the crucial
geography of three continental powers all for the time being opposed to
Western democracy.14 Iran and Kazakhstan have built an oil
pipeline connecting the two countries, with Kazakh oil being pumped to
Iran's north, even as an equivalent amount of oil is shipped from Iran's
south out through the Persian Gulf. Kazakhstan and Iran will also be
linked by rail, providing Kazakhstan with direct access to the Gulf. A
rail line may also connect mountainous Tajikistan to Iran, via
Afghanistan. Iran constitutes the shortest route for all these natural
resource-rich countries to reach international markets.
So imagine an Iran athwart the pipeline routes of Central Asia, along
with its sub-state, terrorist empire of sorts in the Greater Middle
East. But there is still a problem. Given the prestige that Shiite Iran
has enjoyed in sectors of the Sunni Arab world, to say nothing of Shiite
south Lebanon and Shiite Iraq -- because of the regime's implacable
support for the Palestinian cause and its inherent anti-Semitism -- it
is telling that this ability to attract mass support outside its borders
does not similarly carry over into Central Asia. One issue is that the
former Soviet republics maintain diplomatic relations with Israel and
simply lack the hatred toward it that may still be ubiquitous in the
Arab world, despite the initial phases of the Arab Spring. Yet, there is
something larger and deeper at work, something that limits Iran's
appeal not only in Central Asia but in the Arab world as well. That
something is the very persistence of its suffocating clerical rule that,
while impressive in a negative sense -- using Iran's strong state
tradition to ingeniously crush a democratic opposition and torture and
rape its own people -- has also dulled the linguistic and cosmopolitan
appeal that throughout history has accounted for a Greater Iran in a
cultural sense. The Technicolor is gone from the Iranian landscape under
this regime and has been replaced by grainy black and white. Iran's
imperial ambitions are for the time being limited by the very nature of
its clerical rule.
Some years back I was in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, from
whose vantage point Tehran and Mashad over the border in Iranian
Khorasan have always loomed as cosmopolitan centers of commerce and
pilgrimage, in stark contrast to Turkmenistan's own sparsely populated,
nomadic landscape. But while trade and pipeline politics proceeded
apace, Iran held no real magic, no real appeal for Muslim Turkmens, who
are mainly secular and are put off by the mullahs. As extensive as
Iranian influence is by virtue of its in-your-face challenge to America
and Israel, I don't believe we will see the true appeal of Iran, in all
its cultural glory, until the regime liberalizes or is toppled. A
democratic or quasi democratic Iran, precisely because of the
geographical power of the Iranian state, has the possibility to energize
hundreds of millions of fellow Muslims in the Arab world and Central
Asia.
Sunni Arab liberalism could be helped in its rise not only by the
example of the West, or because of a democratic yet dysfunctional Iraq,
but also because of the challenge thrown up by a newly liberal and
historically eclectic Shiite Iran in the future. And such an Iran might
do what two decades of post-Cold War Western democracy and civil society
promotion have failed to -- that is, lead to a substantial prying loose
of the police state restrictions in former Soviet Central Asia.
With its rich culture, vast territory and teeming and sprawling
cities, Iran is, in the way of China and India, a civilization unto
itself, whose future will overwhelmingly be determined by internal
politics and social conditions. Unlike the Achaemenid, Sassanid, Safavid
and other Iranian empires of yore, which were either benign or truly
inspiring in both a moral and cultural sense, this current Iranian
empire of the mind rules mostly out of fear and intimidation, through
suicide bombers rather than through poets. And this both reduces its
power and signals its eventual downfall.
Yet, if one were to isolate a single hinge in calculating Iran's
fate, it would be Iraq. Iraq, history and geography tell us, is entwined
in Iranian politics to the degree of no other foreign country. The
Shiite shrines of Imam Ali (the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law) in An
Najaf and the one of Imam Hussain (the grandson of the Prophet) in
Karbala, both in central-southern Iraq, have engendered Shiite
theological communities that challenge that of Qom in Iran. Were Iraqi
democracy to exhibit even a modicum of stability, the freer intellectual
atmosphere of the Iraqi holy cities could eventually have a profound
impact on Iranian politics. In a larger sense, a democratic Iraq can
serve as an attractor force of which Iranian reformers might in the
future take advantage. For as Iranians become more deeply embroiled in
Iraqi politics, the very propinquity of the two nations with a long and
common border might work to undermine the more repressive of the two
systems. Iranian politics will become gnarled by interaction with a
pluralistic, ethnically Arab Shiite society. And as the Iranian economic
crisis continues to unfold, ordinary Iranians could well up in anger
over hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by their government to
buy influence in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. This is to say nothing of
how Iranians will become increasingly hated inside Iraq as the
equivalent of "Ugly Americans." Iran would like to simply leverage Iraqi
Shiite parties against the Sunni ones. But that is not altogether
possible, since that would narrow the radical Islamic universalism it
seeks to represent in the pan-Sunni world to a sectarianism with no
appeal beyond the community of Shia. Thus, Iran may be stuck trying to
help form shaky Sunni-Shiite coalitions in Iraq and to keep them
perennially functioning, even as Iraqis develop greater hatred for this
intrusion into their domestic affairs. Without justifying the way that
the 2003 invasion of Iraq was planned and executed, or rationalizing the
trillions of dollars spent and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost
in the war, in the fullness of time it might very well be that the fall
of Saddam Hussein began a process that will result in the liberation of
two countries; not one. Just as geography has facilitated Iran's subtle
colonization of Iraqi politics, geography could also be a factor in
abetting Iraq's influence upon Iran.
The prospect of peaceful regime change -- or evolution -- in Iran,
despite the temporary fizzling of the Green Movement, is still greater
now than in the Soviet Union during most of the Cold War. A liberated
Iran, coupled with less autocratic governments in the Arab world --
governments that would be focused more on domestic issues because of
their own insecurity -- would encourage a more equal, fluid balance of
power between Sunnis and Shia in the Middle East, something that would
help keep the region nervously preoccupied with itself and on its own
internal and regional power dynamics, much more than on America and
Israel.
Additionally, a more liberal regime in Tehran would inspire a broad
cultural continuum worthy of the Persian empires of old, one that would
not be constrained by the clerical forces of reaction.
A more liberal Iran, given the large Kurdish, Azeri, Turkmen and
other minorities in the north and elsewhere, may also be a far less
centrally controlled Iran, with the ethnic peripheries drifting away
from Tehran's orbit. Iran has often been less a state than an amorphous,
multinational empire. Its true size would always be greater and smaller
than any officially designated cartography. While the northwest of
today's Iran is Kurdish and Azeri Turk, parts of western Afghanistan and
Tajikistan are culturally and linguistically compatible with an Iranian
state. It is this amorphousness, so very Parthian, that Iran could
return to as the wave of Islamic extremism and the perceived legitimacy
of the mullahs' regime erodes.15
1 Michael Axworthy. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, Basic Books, New York, 2008, p. 3.
2 Brown. The World of Late Antiquity, p. 163.
3 W. Barthold, An Historical Geography of Iran, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, (1903) 1971 and 1984, pp. x-xi and 4.
4 Ostler, Empires of the Word, p. 31.
5 Axworthy, p. 78.
6 Philip K. Hitti, The Arabs: A Short History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1943, p. 109.
7 Brown, pp. 202-03.
8 Hiro, Inside Central Asia, p. 359.
9 Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, translated by Carol Volk, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992 and 1994, pp. 168-70.
10 Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, p. 168.
11 James Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, John Murray, London, 1824, p. 5 of 1949 Cresset Press edition.
12 Vali Nasr, Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, Free Press, New York, 2009.
13 Roy, p. 193.
14 M. K. Bhadrakumar, "Russia, China, Iran Energy Map," Asia Times, 2010.
15 Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Random House, New York, 1996, p. 242.
Συνάντηση με μέλη του Δ.Σ της Ένωσης Ελλήνων Ερευνητών, την πρόεδρο
Μαρία Στουμπούδη και τη Γραμματέα Μαρία Κωνσταντοπούλου, είχε σήμερα
5/9/2012 στο γραφείο του ο ο εισηγητής Παιδείας και Πολιτισμού του
ΠΑΣΟΚ βουλευτής Σερρών Μάρκος Μπόλαρης. Στο επίκεντρο
της συζήτησης βρέθηκαν τα ζητήματα οργάνωσης και λειτουργίας του
ερευνητικού ιστού της χώρας. Αναφορικά με την επιχειρούμενη αναδιάρθρωση
των ερευνητικών κέντρων της χώρας ο κ. Μπόλαρης τόνισε
ότι οι όποιες προτάσεις θα πρέπει να προχωρήσουν συντεταγμένα, με
σχεδιασμό που θα βασίζεται σε επιστημονικά κριτήρια και θα έχει ως στόχο
την ενδυνάμωση των δημόσιων ερευνητικών φορέων για τη διαμόρφωση
συνθηκών αριστείας μέσω της «συγκέντρωσης δυνάμεων».
Συνάντηση με μέλη του Δ.Σ της Ένωσης Ελλήνων Ερευνητών, την πρόεδρο
Μαρία Στουμπούδη και τη Γραμματέα Μαρία Κωνσταντοπούλου, είχε σήμερα
5/9/2012 στο γραφείο του ο ο εισηγητής Παιδείας και Πολιτισμού του
ΠΑΣΟΚ βουλευτής Σερρών Μάρκος Μπόλαρης. Στο επίκεντρο
της συζήτησης βρέθηκαν τα ζητήματα οργάνωσης και λειτουργίας του
ερευνητικού ιστού της χώρας. Αναφορικά με την επιχειρούμενη αναδιάρθρωση
των ερευνητικών κέντρων της χώρας ο κ. Μπόλαρης τόνισε
ότι οι όποιες προτάσεις θα πρέπει να προχωρήσουν συντεταγμένα, με
σχεδιασμό που θα βασίζεται σε επιστημονικά κριτήρια και θα έχει ως στόχο
την ενδυνάμωση των δημόσιων ερευνητικών φορέων για τη διαμόρφωση
συνθηκών αριστείας μέσω της «συγκέντρωσης δυνάμεων».
, which will be released Sept. 11.
