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mojo: interesting.
thanks for posting the paper.
i assume that this was written for a poli sci class?
i ask because political science has genre features that historians do not share and since my training is as a historian, i come at it from that direction.
you are trying to do a whole lot in a single, quite short paper: the argument is more a dissertation or book length one.
in this short form, you run into many of the problems that follow from trying to derive a general structure from within complex individual case studies.
first, the paper relies heavily on an associative logic: basically, you make a quite detailed case concerning hezbollah/iran linkages insofar as lebanon 1982 is concerned. but once you set that up, you engage in a kind of flip logically--for example, to say that iran supported hezbollah directly in the early 80s does not mean that therefore hezbollah can be understood as "iranian terrorism"....and the linkage you set up between hezbollah and a "radical faction of the iranian revolutionary guard" is not strong enough to make the equation stick.
but it does set up what the paper turns around, which is the assumption that all shi'a groups operate in some kind of direct connection with all others simply because they are shi'a. and iran, having the largest population of shi'a population and (obviously) a shi'a dominated political regime (which is internally FAR more complex than the paper can allow for, given its length)functions as the culmination of this logic. this appears to be heavily reinforced by the source material that you chose to use...which sounds (via the echoes that show up in the paper) as if they mostly operate within the logic of the present policy as shaped by the "war on terror"---which is a simplifying machinery before it is anything else. perhaps this power of simplification explains its appeal.
so you end up with a kind of term substitution exercise in which shi'a militant organizations end up getting equated with iran as over against the interests/actions of the us.
it's correlate is the notion of terrorism, which does not allow for much in the way of detailed analysis of particular social-historical contexts more or less by definition.
so via these choices, everything gets flattened into everything else.
when you get to iraq, and iran's role in it, you run into trouble as a simple function of the breadth of the paper's scope. you discuss the nuclear program as an element in iranian foreign policy in general and then make some general references to its implications in iraq, but the paper has to stop and so it does.
anyway, historians are pedants.
i probably am one too.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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