HAVING spent three weeks in Iran last month, I found Greg Russell’s article (Iran leadership under fire, June 30) disappointingly one-sided. It is true that Iran is a theocracy but the oppressiveness of the regime is overstated. Fewer than 2% of the population ever set foot in a mosque, while educational standards have risen dramatically, particularly for women who now constitute 65% of university students.
Women are subject to dress restrictions, but they did not seem oppressive in the streets of Shiraz, where the girls parade in jeans and T-shirts finished off for modesty with their boyfriends’ “button-up” and a gauzy scarf over the head. There is poverty in Iran, but in 2500 miles of travel I saw nothing to equal the squalor of India, and counted fewer beggars in my stay than I found on Edinburgh’s Middle Meadows Walk on my return.
The background to the rule of the Ayatollahs is of course the savage autocracy of the last Shah put in place by the British and the USSR, and the coup organised by the CIA, with British connivance, to oust an elected, secular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, which left the Iranians in despair. Western intervention has a sorry record.
Trump and the Saudis have a different picture to paint, but I am sorry that The National should report without qualification the rantings of a dissident group or remark that many of the criticisms expressed apply with equal force to many of Britain’s friends and allies in the Middle East.
James Scott
Edinburgh
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