In 1976 an investment banker turned adventure novelist, Paul Erdman, penned a best-selling thriller, The Crash of ’79. Center to the plot was the Shah of Iran making a grab for the oilfields of the Arab Middle East, with a well-armed military, thanks to rising oil prices. Of course, barely 24 months later the Shah was ousted by radical Islamists, who subsequently bled the country white in a bloody and futile eight-year war with Iraq. Oil prices crashed after Ronald Reagan took office, and all thoughts of an Iranian version of a Nazi blitzkrieg disappeared.
Well, if Erdman were still alive (he died in 2007), he could write a very plausible updated version of his novel, with—very frighteningly—the all too likely possibility that this time fiction would turn into fact.
WNU Editor: Read the book after the fall of the Shah .... and I enjoyed reading it. But is it possible in today's world but with a Shiite theocracy in control instead of the Shah.... I doubt it. But it makes for great fiction.
Does Steve Forbes know how to change a light bulb? No.
ReplyDeleteDoes Steve Forbes throw a baseball like a girl? Yes.
Go work on yer flat tax proposals, hack.