TWO CAR BOMBS REVIVE OLD HISTORICAL DEBATE

It was like a Hollywood spy caper playing right there on the streets of Tehran. Out of nowhere, assassins speed by with plastic bombs that kill two men in their cars. Immediately the Iranian government protests espionage by Israel and the US. But there's more to the plot....

In an age of expanding technology, the world has come to believe that we are often like leaves caught up in the flow of a stream. Swept along by invisible forces beyond our comprehension or control. You know, that feeling you get whenever you sit in front of the nightly news and just shake your head.

In this assassination there is reason to revisit the old historical debate about the Great Man Theory. Many historians argue that history doesn't shape people as much as certain people shape history. People like Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Luther, Elizabeth I, Galileo, Lincoln, Hitler, John Paul II. Without them, the course of history would have been entirely different. Their deaths as well as their lives make a difference.

Back to Tehran.

The two victims are reported to have been key atomic scientists in the Iranian program to achieve atomic status in the region. Such status would alter the balance of power in a volatile part of the world. Is it possible that Israeli and US agents would have been assigned to thwart the Iranian effort this way rather than by open warfare...?

The question is its own answer. And in its own way raises the old debate about people shaping history. Here in 2010 the 5000 year-old debate may be settled in the blood-stained streets of Tehran. Without these two experts the Iranian program may be hampered...and if hampered their weapon status may be delayed ...and if delayed other powers may choose alternate courses of action...and if, well, you get the idea.

As in the blood-stained seats of Ford's Theatre in 1865 or in the blood-stained streets of Dallas in 1963, this blood may change the course of history. Which, if nothing else, would seem to reassert the notion that people still count in the course of history. Often by no more than a bullet. Or a ballot. Or a belief.