I agree BP...which is why they're the 2nd oldest country on the planet.....Now somebody lighting off a bomb and getting it blamed on Iran is a different matter. First you have to cultivate the 'image' that they're all crazy.
.
...TM7
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Sure TM;
...And in my blacksmith shop, I have a hammer that is 700 years old...only 20 new handles and 14 new heads..
The very name "Iran" wasn't even used before 1935, when Reza Shah insisted upon it! There has been no continuity of government there..the last "revolution' being 1979..fostered by Jimmie Carter. There has been no continuity of belief there, since before Islam arrived most of those tribes were into animism and/or idolatry. Even the borders have not been continuously held, since the Persians did not consider what is called Iran today..to be their own accepted borders. In fact, throughout history those very borders have been rather fluid..
When one considers history, the only people in the mideast who have held any semblance of a cohesive, structured society for some 5,000 years, are the Jews! Sadly, the majority of them were evicted from their land for some 1800 years...during which time, squatters moved in..
Many students of history don't honor "squatters rights"..since we can see what happens even today when squatters move into foreclosed properties..they don't take care of the property as did those who actually "earned' the property.
If you are talking about the land itself..how can you argue that the land Iran occupies is any "older" than Canada, Russia or the UK?
...And, as you can see by the maps below, today's Iraq comes nowhere near to what the old Persian empire was. Let's have a bit of intellectual honesty..Iran is a relatively
new country, a child of the Balfour commission.