inflationary boom and Khatami's privatizations, has produced a vast black market, an unofficial unemployment rate of 25 per cent and a looming agricultural crisis. Students are disaffected, labour rebellious, the Arab south-west, Kurdish and Azeri north, and Baluch south-east simmering. There is ample material in this maze for every kind of domestic and imperial intrigue to topple the unwelcome victor of a popular contest. Meanwhile, those who once dreamt of 'liberation' via a us intervention should take note of the worsening nightmare in Iraq. But for the moment, it is Iran's external role that holds centre stage. Here too the directionless clerical state has left a scene of confusion. Since the end of the Iran -- Iraq War, its foreign policy has been little more than a ragbag of incoherent opportunism, combining conventional diplomacy of a cautious, typically collaborationist sort with largely costless gestures of solidarity to fellow-Shi'a abroad, principally Hizbollah in southern Lebanon, with crumbs for the Palestinians. Tehran was tactfully silent during the Gulf War of 1991, with not even a peep of complaint when us troops were stationed in the Holy Places. It instructed its surrogates in the Northern Alliance to pave the way for the American invasion of Afghanistan. It collaborated with the cia in preparations for the occupation of Iraq, and directed sciri and its other political assets to prop up us rule in Baghdad. In exchange for these favours to the Great Satan, what has it received? American armies camped on its eastern and