Also, the reason infant mortality is higher because the medicine has improved, including bio-technology and other IT related medical advances. We also had less casulaty in Iran as compared to Vietnam war precisely because of great improvement in medicine and medical procedure. Some of the Iraq or Afghanistan veterans who are alive today, would not have surived during the Vietnama war.

Providing funds for stem cell research is certainly no justification to over look the hanging of gays, rigging elections and torturing political opponents. Bush and co were a regime that lasted for 8 unfortunate years, However, we are a center left country that favors Stem cell research.

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/537/index.html

Solving the problem of 30+ million American citizens who cannot acquire even basic medical services and pharmaceutical products in a public health system wrongly construed to be a "private market mechanism" by forcing them to purchase "Health Care Insurance" from a handful of financial corporations who, themselves now acquire no moral hazard in return (ie., they would become too big / too essential to have "the freedom to fail") is, in my humble opinion: lousy law; dangerous precedent; and in historical retrospective ~ indicative of a continuing ‘hollowing out’ process of American government.

The Right may have invented "Big Brother," but today history will record that it was The Left who implemented it, righteously so.

My point is richly illustrated in the journal article itself, which compares Iran directly to Nazi Germany. The arrogance of it! The assumption is that the US is essentially good, and Iran is essentially evil. But the evidence does not support such self-congratulatory approaches.

As I'm sure most Buchananite and Ron Paul anti-Iraq War folks would agree.

What was the infant mortality in Iran in 1900? 1920, 1940, 1950, 1960?

So infant mortality improves from 1970 to present day and the ONLY reason for that is because of the hyper-socialist super nice guy theocrats. Aww how sweet of them.

I wonder how many millions of dollars the Shah put it into medical research back in the day. Funny how you don't say that. I wonder how much medical research could be done in present day Iran if it weren't for the infrastructure and universities the Shah had built.

I wonder what the infant mortality rate would be in Iran had the throw back theocrats had not taken over the country.

I'd like you bring you to an Islamic Republic clinic or hospital, unclean and disgusting. Where you have to bribe the nurse with money for relatives of the mother to see the baby, who then touches the same newborn without washing their hands after touching the money.

By the way, whats the inflation rate in Iran again? Oh thats right, 11.5%

Your posts regarding the Pahlavi era of Iran are in my opinion incredibly un-even handed and unbecoming of a professional historian.

Its one thing to be anti-war and for diplomacy, its another to distort history to be that way.

Iran's 2007 ranking of Human Development Index (HDI) in 2007 was 88th in the world (behing Azerbaijan and Thailand); it was 95th in life expectancy (behind Samoa and El Salvador); 94th in adult literacy rate (behind Botswana and Syria); 59th in poverty index (behind Sao Tome and Principe and Mongolia); 58th in Probability of not surviving to age 40 (behind Panama and Maldives); 52nd in People not using an improved water source (behind Tunisia and Grenada); 64th in Children underweight for age (behind Swaziland and El Salvador).

With respect to Comparing Females as % males, it was 165th in Life expectancy at birth (behind Algeria and Iceland); 90th in Adult literacy rate (behind Peru and Saudi Arabia); and 106th in Combined primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment ratio (behind Maldives and Mauretania).

Iran's female literacy rate is lower than that of Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria (none of which have anywhere near Iran's reserves of oil and natural gas) and also lower than Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, etc (all of which are more patriarchal societies than Iran).

Meanwhile, the current Iranian regime has executed an exponentially greater number of its own citizens than the Shah's regime. When will Western liberals and leftists learn to stop touting the Islamic Republic's vastly exaggerated "achievements" and tell the truth, namely, that it is the most violent and repressive regime in Iran's history and that despite 31 years of enormous oil and natural gas revenues (at times enjoying some of the highest oil prices in history) it has demonstrated that it is a pathetic underachiever in the realm of standards of living?