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Notes -
Why doesn't Ted Cruz know the population of Iran? And what is with him generally? Or the whole upper echelons of the US govt?
I reference a recent Tucker Carlson interview with Cruz, where it turns out he didn't know said population (and has since responded with an AI meme image of Tucker asking Luke the population of the Death Star).
Turns out that the population of Iran is 92 million, I thought it was around 80. 80 would be a fairly reasonable answer. Even Yemen is surprisingly populous, around 41 million. Fun game to try - estimate the population of various countries in these areas.
I thought Ted Cruz was supposed to be super-smart, wouldn't it be natural to read up on Iran? He is on the Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism. It's also relevant to US strategic choices and his particular love of Israel. Knowing about the subpopulations and relative size of the Azeris, Kurds and similar would be relevant to regime change, which is his professed goal:
To his credit he does know that Iran is Persian and predominantly Shia. And maybe being on a bunch of other subcommittees means he has to divide up his time and energy in all these different areas. But it's not like Tucker is asking really sophisticated questions about the position and integration of Azeri elites in the Tehran power structure. That really should be dealt with by an expert diplomat. But senators are supposed to be making strategic decisions, one has to have some base of knowledge to decide upon different courses of action.
Cruz also thinks that the Bible requires Christians to support the nation of Israel, which is somewhat non-mainstream in theology: "Where does my support for Israel come from, number 1 we're biblically commanded to support Israel". Tucker tries to ask 'do you mean the government of Israel' and Cruz says the nation of Israel, as if to say it's common-sense that the nation of Israel as referred to in the Bible is the same as the state of Israel today. It seems like he's purposely conflating the dual meanings of nation as ethnic group and nation as state, which is a stupid part of English.
Also Cruz said to Tucker "I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States”. How would this help in the context of a hostile interview, does he think that's a helpful thing to say? I can only imagine that Cruz thinks this is a winning issue, he wants to play hard rather than go down the wishy-washy 'Judeo-Christian' values route. Is declaring your devotion to a foreign country really that popular in America?
Trump also posted this somewhat ominous diatribe from Mike Huckabee (pastor and ambassador to Israel) praising Trump's divine prominence, his position similar to 'Truman in 1945' and how he has to listen to god and the angels only... https://x.com/Mondoweiss/status/1934999328583713096/photo/1
This episode reminds me of how George W Bush apparently didn't know of the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam until after deciding to invade, he brought up Gog and Magog when trying to persuade Chirac to join the war. Maybe that's false, some have disputed it. Or how Trump apparently won't read any long extracts of text and demands pictures. Maybe that's also false, lots of stories have been made about Trump policy. It's known that Biden didn't know whether people were alive or dead or what was happening much of the time. Large swathes of the Democrats can't tell the difference between men and women.
Here's another one I just found from another US congressman: https://x.com/VoteRandyFine/status/1839686465820766542
That's just weird!
There are serious structural problems with how America selects its politicians if this is the calibre of talent that's drawn into positions of great power. At the risk of sounding like an edgy atheist fighting a war everyone's tired of and moved on from years ago, surely theology should have no place in grand strategy. It's normal to have colourful characters in politics, some corruption, some old people who don't know what's going on, a certain level of lobbying. But this seems to be on a qualitatively different level, with serious results.
People are contrarian signaling over “why should he know the population”
Because it shows that he has a general idea of the makeup of the country. Compare a country like Iraq (45M) or Afghanistan (41M) with Iran (90M).
It’s twice their size.
Iran is also a space-faring nation. They started launching satellites in 2009, they have advanced hypersonic missiles.
It’s just a very, very different country than our previous Middle East adventures, and Tucker quizzing him on this was to elucidate the fact that Ted’s primary driving motivation to get the US involved is (as Ted himself admitted in another section of the interview) a doomsday prophecy based on a hilariously absurd (and Israel-serving) misreading of the Bible.
I would argue that the exact population does not matter that much, often. If Afghanistan had twice the population (and area), the US would still have conquered them, and if they had only half their population and area, the Taliban would still have taken over again once the US moved out.
Obviously, the order of magnitude matters, as in "Is the population count similar to Belgium, Germany or China?"
Then there is the area to consider. I would have guessed that Iran was about the same size as Afghanistan, and I would have been off -- they are 2.5 times as large. This does not bode well for any invader who wants to engage in nation-building.
I would add that Iran is also supplying Russia with drones. Now Russia is obviously not the prime military adversary that it was some decades ago, but the fact that they find Iranian drones useful against Western equipment -- and the fact Iran produces enough to sell them to Russia -- clearly indicates (just as the space program does), that this is not a country full of goat-herders.
There is an example of an easy mode regime change target. A theocratic polity with only 2M people in less than 400 square kilometers, whose weapons industry is very much on a DIY level. That example is the Gaza strip. If Trump wants to prove that he is better at nation building that GWB was, this is where he might want to start.
Afghanistan's population more than doubled during American occupation, from 20 to 42-5 million. The Gaza strip similarly went from 1 to 2.1 million, at the same time.
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