Vermav, hi.I'll try to answer your questions as best I...

Vermav, hi.

I'll try to answer your questions as best I can:


Putting the dollar above human lives?

You appear to be appealing to Christian sensibilities of life being priceless and in doing so you are inviting your targets to take a guilt dump? In the real world life is not priceless and all life is not valued the same: for life to be priceless budgets have to be unlimited to protect it? Scarce resources are a daily problem even if our religious leaders want us to value life more?

2. Nobody likes a smart a*se successfully predicting regime change and profiting from it without suffering injury to himself while 20% of Iranians die for it. Even Seals predicts regime change in Iran is inevitable. We differ on how soon it will happen. Nasty regimes can last for a very long time of course (N. Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma).

3. Your thesis uses a crude metric: life/death. I expect quality of life is important for some in Iran. The current regime does not give some Iranians (a small but vocal group perhaps?) the dignity and freedom they want, and this group is probably the most important group in determining Iran's future prosperity and place in the world. Leadership by the least educated usually results in the most educated being exiled, executed or imprisoned, and this is a waste of a nation's most expensive human capital (huge scarce resources have been given up to educate such people abroad and these are often the people most critical of the regime - think Pol Pot executing foreign educated Cambodian doctors, etc. Iran suffers from a large brain drain. Burma will take off if Aung San Suu Kyi is successful in establishing the rule of law and attracting the sort of investment she seeks: under ignorant, self-interested, corrupt, repressive leadership Burma has underperformed badly against Thailand since 1947.

3. Most Iranians who want regime change will not be demanding it to please me. They protest and get killed because they want regime change for themselves and their families, not for me.

4. The nature of regime change is that the cost (lives expended) comes first before the benefits are experienced. So people advocating it are at a disadvantage from people like yourself?

"Deciding the fate of millions of others to boost our own profits?" (National self interest? Boosting our economic performance at others' expense?)

It is not clear to me if policy makers make policies and then place their bets or if they place their bets and then make policies to ensure their bets come right. I look at each case one at a time. A tradition of investigative journalism in the West presumably is an obstacle to politicians making easy money. I am not a policy maker and nobody gives a toss about my opinion, least of all Mr Jordinson. He has done absolutely nothing to master Persian or improve his understanding of ME politics since becoming MD (although he has done a good job on Sandpiper). Profiting from regime change is no easy matter, and as previously stated, nobody likes smart a*ses. Mr Jordinson has been promoted beyond his competence, IMO, (making decisions over our Iranian asset) so of course he will give away all the profit potential from regime change to MAK holders, if the Iranian regime doesn't first give the project to the Russians. It is sod's law that he will, and there is nothing I can do about it. Some of my UCL shares were acquired when Mehdiabad was a zinc/finance play: it only became a regime change/legal play later. I accept the bulk of my shares were bought with regime change in mind, but I have no influence on UK Govt. policy on Iran regime change.

I don't think we can just decree "regime change" and boost profits: Iranians are not likely to put up with a Western imposed Govt. That is partly what the 1979 revolution was about: the Shah was imposed by us after the Mossadegh coup (although some people didn't like the idea of their daughters meeting men in University and choosing their own partners, and some people found the journey from countryside to cities where people behaved like in Europe too traumatic): they didn't want a moderniser? When I lived in Iran they produced 6m bopd (some of it using Israeli technicians). Today they produce about 2m I think. Regime change could bring more business opportunities for everyone, including the Russians and Chinese. I accept your point regime change may just transfer privileges from one group to another of roughly the same size, but the regime is so bad in Iran it is hard to imagine a worse one or one as bad following it if it is thrown out by its own people.

"We'd be complaining if they imposed regime change on us."

It probably isn't going to happen: it would be hard to impose an autocratic state on a population that has experienced real democracy. It would be hard for the Iranians to get a worse regime than the current one. So the issue then is how much blood has to be spilt? Probably quite a lot is the answer. The alternative is also unpleasant: Middle East nuclear arms race, cold war, dismal economic performance (for everyone)and continued human rights abuses.

I remain happy to invest for regime change, and no that is not the same as putting dollar above life: it is more complicated than that. The biggest obstacle is Jordinson. I wouldn't mind giving up Mehdiabad if I knew the substitute asset was going to 30 bag in the same time scale as Mehdiabad. All IMO. DYOR.