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Fiery but mostly peaceful protests in Iran.
I don't quite want to take the position that the current unrest in Iran is bad, but I do want to consider it. There is a lot of discussion downthread about the insidious effects of pervasive and assertive civil disobedience on the legitimate exersize of state power, and I wonder why that same logic doesn't apply here. It's common in the American conciousness to assume that Iran = bad, but I get the impression that a lot of Iran's badness is exaggerated by Western media. Is the current government of Iran illegitimate? If so, why? Is it because Iran isn't a full democracy? The United States props up lots of countries that are less democratic than Iran. Is democracy in Middle Eastern countries even desirable? It doesn't quite feel right to categorically rule-out theocracy as a legitimate form of governance, even if most of us would find living under one alienating.
The elephant in the room is geopolitics. Iran is aligned with Russia and opposed to many US allies. It would be good for US geopolitical intrests for the current regime to fall. Does this somehow make angry mobs torching government buildings okay, another form of spooky moral action at a distance?
I am not an expert on Iran, so feel free to tell me if the Khamenei Regime is actually the second coming of the Khmer Rouge or Third Reich.
Even from a perspective that doesn't care about progressive moral values or democracy, the current government of Iran leaves much to be desired. Take the water crisis, caused by decades of mismanagement. How can a country with nuclear weapons struggle with water? How does a major oil producer have rolling blackouts? Or 40% annual inflation? That's really quite bad! These are bigger drivers of the protests than democracy! Protests of this sort are a natural check on government mismanagement, even when they don't overthrow the regime (which they usually don't), because they put pressure on the regime to keep the cost of goods low in a way somewhat similar to fair elections.
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Given that our resident antisemites appear to be on vacation, I guess it falls to me to mention two relevant facts about the Iranian protests.
(1) Protesters are calling for the installation of Pahlavi as the Shah.
(2) There exists a Mossad operation to make Pahlavi the Shah (paywalled, Haaretz seems to be a mainstream Israeli newspaper.)
From an Israeli perspective, it makes a bit of sense. It seems highly unlikely that any democratically elected Iranian president would ever be as Israel-friendly as Pahlavi is, so why risk it?
For the West, supporting the Pahlavi dynasty over Iranian democracy is at least historically consistent. In 1953, CIA and MI6 backed the Shah's coup because the democratically elected government wanted to nationalize the oil industry.
Iran was then run for 26 years by a pro-Western autocrat until the Shah became deeply unpopular, at which point the Ayatollah took over, creating the Iran we all know
and love.Given that history, I would be surprised if Iranians wanted to go for a monarchy again. I would be even more surprised if they wanted a Pahlavi again. It would be like Germany saying "maybe we should give the Hohenzollern another chance", if the guy in question was also Putin's best buddy.
Of course, this is a result of the theocrats being stupid. Everyone knows that once you have disposed a hereditary monarch, his descendants will form natural rallying points for counter-revolutionaries. The Soviets certainly knew how to avoid having to deal with someone who would have a claim to the tsardom later on.
I'm not Israeli, so I don't have much sense of the media landscape over there, but from what I've seen Israelis on Twitter say Haaretz is basically their version of the UK Guardian: a firm disciple of the international progressive cause which means they can only ever be overtly hostile when writing about themselves or the west more broadly. Notably, their journalists sometimes seem to get caught being paid by Qatar.
This isn't to say I don't think the Mossad are active in supporting less hostile parts of Iranian society (they'd be fools not to be). But I suspect the pro-Shah sentiment of the recent protests exists for many more reasons than Israeli involvement.
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People want the last not-horribly-mismanaged regime, and monarchy seems to work for the middle east in a way democracy doesn't. Monarchies are certainly rather good at avoiding the 'retarded populism' failure mode that, quite frankly, seems extraordinarily unlikely to fix Iran.
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Having a pro-Israel leader sounds like a strict upgrade for ME countries.
I think that having a leader who is not fundamentally hostile to Israel would be an upgrade, yes.
However, most of the population in Muslim countries have long expressed some hostility towards Israel, and Bibi's war/peace in Gaza has done little to win their hearts and minds.
Any leader who is seen as a Mossad stooge will start with a 50 point penalty to stability, basically.
Given these circumstances, I now wonder a bit what Mossad is playing at. If they were serious about installing Pahlavi, one would think that they would keep their involvement non-obvious. They can keep a secret if they want to, so it appears they want the world to know that the Shah has their support. I do not have the context to know what their play is here, though.
The goal isn't to install Pahlavi, the goal is to collapse the country Libya style. Bait Iranian protesters into a hopeless slaughter after Trump said he wouldn't allow Iran to slaughter protesters as a pretense to drag Trump into it. If the goal was actually to support a revolution then loudly telegraphing their support makes no sense but if the goal is to get them killed so that Trump looks weak if he doesn't start dropping bombs then it makes perfect sense.
They're probably blowing a lot of assets in the process, but from their perspective it's better to go for broke while they still have total American support than to wait and risk an Iranian comeback under a future Tucker-like isolationist or even a Mamdani-like anti-Zionist Presidency.
That is plausible. Still, what does Israel gain by loudly backing Pahlavi? Presumably, the Ayatollah regime would crack down as hard on "we want to install the Shah" as they do on "we want to install the Shah, who is btw best buddies with Israel".
Plus, there is a general value to not announcing your astroturfing campaigns because it will make people who claim that a campaign is taking place look like delusional paranoids. 'Actually, Mossad was pretty open about their social media campaign against the Mullah regime' is not an argument you would your critics for free.
Then there is the signaling aspect towards both Pahlavi and future allies. "Oops, we leaked this by mistake" is not something anyone is likely to buy from them. They can have great opsec if they want to have it.
One thing which might explain their behavior is that it might be much more expensive to run an operation with good deniability. But in a world where the Trump administration calls Good a 'Domestic Terrorist', e.g. where statements are made for the sake of the most gullible 5% of the population, one would expect that any threadbare denial would be beneficial.
Perhaps the calculation is that the regime is much more likely to kill its opponents if they believe they are Mossad agents. Opposing the Ayatollah will probably earn you a long prison sentence, but being paid by Mossad will reliably get you executed. So telegraphing "btw, the protests are our doing and all the protesters are our agents", they are egging on the regime to kill them in large numbers, which will in turn force Trump to act, as you observed.
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Sure, but they're Muslims and furthermore have been inculcated with propaganda against the Little Satan since the revolution (or birth). Unless they've grown to hate the regime so much that this propaganda has actually made them favor Israel.
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I will bite - list lots of countries less democratic than Iran that US props up? We have saudi arabia probably and ? The Khamenei regime cuts off people hands because they have tattoos, Khamenei regime blinds women because they don't wear hijab, Khamenei regime kills rappers for the act of rapping, Khamenei regime sits on top of some of the richest resources in the world and still can't provide the basic needs for their people. And the majority of people didn't vote for that in elections.
It is not about theocracy or whatever - it is about stupid. And Iran rulers are.
Aside from the entire gulf, Azerbaijan, Jordan, Egypt, basically the rest of the middle east?
They all have exactly as much democracy as Iran.
Why doesn't Iran have more democracy than the UAE and Saudi Arabia? Iran has national elections with universal sufferage that actually affect some things.
Iran holds sham elections in which only candidates approve by the Guardian Council may run. Women are of course invited to vote in these sham elections. Their voter turnout tends to be very low in protest of not being allowed to select candidates. But they can certainly vote for the undesired candidates foisted onto them.
A quick googling finding an article describing their last major election:
6 out of 80 would-be candidates were allowed to run. Of those 6 regime approved candidates: voters, including women, can have their pick. The other 74 candidates can fuck off because it is not a real democracy.
Same thing in other non-democratic nations. Of course adult citizens have the right to vote for only candidates pre-selected by the ruling party. That's how it works in Iran, China, etc.
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I've written a lot about Iran and political alternatives, but it's hard to find the posts. tldr: The people are good and friendlier to the West than many in the West, the government is the opposite and very repressive.
I'll add an anecdote here from swiss bike touring friends who spent 3 years traveling the world. They said Iran was the friendliest country in the world from their experience.
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If your country has colossal protests every few years that have to be repressed with significant bloodshed, you probably have an internal legitimacy problem.
No. The legitimacy of rebellion in Iran is not based on US interests.
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I do find it interesting that violent civil disruption abroad is winked at and generates sympathy from the right domestically (whereas the left mostly ignores it, be it Venezuelans or Iranians), but violent civil disruption domestically engenders the opposite feeling from the same set.
If not for the Islam, the muslim women would have been part of the thicc latina belt. Because everyone loves thicc latinas, everything that hurts islam and non secular rulers is good because it will bring more thicc latinas into circulation.
Thats why progressives love islamic fundamentalism, it keeps the real competition away from the true power base of progressivism, white women with nothing better to offer. Thats why the ICE agent shot the woman, his filipina wife was whispering "destroy my competition!" into his ears!
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Why? Right-wingers dislike those governments, and would love to see them lose popular support, legitimacy, and power.
Same reason left-wingers get excited about domestic civil disruption.
I assume leftists would be okay with protests against far-right (or far-right aligned) regimes. But there aren't too many of those left: Pinochet and Franco are both long gone. The closest you could get would be El Salvador or Argentina (not seeing huge protests recently, but not nothing), or Russia (not seeing huge protests, also historically complicated). I would put Iran in that bucket too, but leftist sentiments on Islamic regimes are complicated (among other things: the right is happy about it, so they can't be). Some Israeli protests get leftist sympathies (anti-Bibi ones).
Some of this is just that they were so successful at the end of the last century that they have comparatively few nation-state enemies. Frankly, the right doesn't have that many either.
A good chunk of the (old, in more ways than one) right would be happy with protests against Russia. It's just enjoying one's enemy's problems, in both that case and Iran.
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From what I understand, Iran has democracy, and has in fact had a very long-running democracy, it's just that it has a theocracy stapled on top of it – sort of like how the Constitution restrains US democracy, the Ayatollahs restrain Iranian democracy.
In my mind, this makes me more optimistic about regime change if it is genuinely a popular uprising, simply because (at least in theory) Iran would not need to reinvent the wheel from the ground up. They could (in theory, as I understand it) simply remove the Ayatollah and theocratic laws and keep the regular government in place. But real life is often messier than in theory.
I think this is correct, although I would suggest the tightness of their relationship is sometimes overblown. People sometimes suggest that Russia and Iran are joined at the hip, but Russia actually has pretty good relations with Israel and (from what I understand) has refrained from top-end weapons deliveries to Iran out of deference to Israel, and worked to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. (At this rate the Iranians are never going to be able to replace their F-14s...)
However, Russia and Iran definitely share an interest in containing US power. It's going to be tremendously interesting if Iran and Venezuela both switch to US-friendly or at least US-neutral within a month of each other. It is tempting to say that neutralizing Iran as a foe would wrap up US concerns in the Middle East, particularly if a lack of Iranian support crippled the Houthis. I think that's likely an overstatement, but if Iran and Yemen went down that would basically be the end of Middle Eastern governments that were really hostile to the United States.
That is a bit of a vacuous definition of democracy. It is alike to asking a prisoner to pick between the noose and the firing squad, then reporting that the government granted his request to get hanged, as if it was MAID instead of an execution. A lot of countries are democratic on paper and have elections, but are effectively dictatorships. Take the former German Democratic (!) Republic (!), for example. Sure, they had elections. Perhaps sometimes the vote even decided which SED candidate would get elected. But without broad freedoms of speech and the freedom of running for office, their system was very far away from what anyone would consider a functioning liberal democracy.
I also disagree with you on basing an Iranian democracy on a continuation of the institutions of the Ayatollah regime. There is always the danger of backsliding. The theocrats had 45 years to entrench themselves. If you simply remove the Ayatollah from their parliament, it seems likely that during the next depression, people will vote for the fundamentalists and they will install him again.
Offtopic:
“Elections” in the GDR are very strange as they weren’t even sham elections. We imagine the failure mode of a democratic banana republic were a tyrant/regime keeps power through election fraud or controlled opposition, but in communist countries there was/is no opposition.
Instead communist Germany had a “unity list” as an election ballot which looked like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Stimmzettel_Volkskammerwahl_1950_%28M_143%29.jpg
You notice the fundamental element missing: any kind of choice. There is not even a field for yes/no!
You could technically disagree, but for that you had to strike out the whole list with a pen. You could do that in secret by going into the polling booth, but of course using the booth makes you suspicious as everyone else just folded the ballot and put it directly into the ballot box. That is how you get 99% election results.
Nominally only a quarter of the “parliament” were candidates from the ruling SED, the other pre-selected members were from “democratic parties” and mass organizations to fake a multiparty system. But parliaments role was simply to confirm unanimously the decisions of the SED central committee.
My understanding is that this was the usual role of parliament in socialist/communist countries, though I don’t know how this worked in practice with speeches and committee work. Surely there were some contrarians slipping through the system? In communist China there are wisely no elections (I think it disillusioned Eastern Germans more that their elections were visibly pointless busy work), but the Chinese People Congress is similarly staffed with two thirds CCP members and one third by members of “eight allowed minor democratic parties“.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_parties_(China)
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To me one of the immediate risks of having a government overthrown is a lack of continuity of government. Most democracies are insufficiently respectful of human rights to my mind. The reason that Iran's democratic government seems like a positive to me in this specific circumstance is because there might be a system of government that could survive the fall of the Ayatollah and provide basic order and, ideally, legitimacy, not necessarily because they would be a liberal democracy. In other words, ideally there is a known factor, not an unknown power vacuum, if the current system of government is overthrown.
I doubt the ayatollahs are actually this popular in Iran, but I could be wrong!
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I don’t know much about Iran but I think the Ayatollah and guardian council have much more power than you suggest. The guardian council essentially has absolute power along with the ayatollah (ability to veto any law and disqualify any candidates for any election) and is 50% chosen by him, and 50% elected by the parliament (which the guardian council can, as mentioned, disqualify candidates for).
I just googled it and they disqualified 74 out of 80 candidates in the previous Iranian election. Of the handpicked few the Guardian Council chose, voters may pick one.
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I didn't mean to suggest they weren't powerful, only that there was a clear successor government and electoral process.
But I haven't looked into it as much as I would like, either, it's possible that the Parliament would have trouble governing "on its own" at this point.
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American media, which is still enthralled with the Obama administration, which wanted to empower Iran, is constantly churning out pro-Iran propaganda. That the average American still thinks Iran is pretty bad is an example of reality winning out over forced media narratives.
I think most mainstream media linked the Iranian regime to the Hamas attacks and the Assad regime. If I were to search for op-eds on Iran in the Guardian or the NYT, do you predict that the general consensus would be "Iran is a peace-loving democracy, and we should definitely trust them to enrich uranium as much as they want"?
The Guardian recently decided to publish an opinion piece written by the Iranian foreign minister. I don't think the Guardian editorial staff are dumb enough to plaster their website with "WE LOVE HAMAS" or "DEATH TO THE WEST" but it's pretty clear where their sympathies lie when it comes to the Israel+US vs Iran+proxies conflict.
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The Iranian population is much more secular and pro-western than their neighbors, even those that are American allies on paper, and has the human capital needed to support a first world economy, so the fact that they have been languishing under an Islamist theocracy for decades instead of achieving their full potential is a tragedy of similar proportions to Eastern Europe being stuck behind the iron curtain during the Cold War.
This latest round of protests was also sparked by economic problems such as rampant inflation and Tehran running out of water, and not the sorts of purely cultural issues that some here would pattern-match to foreign interference, such as the 2022 protests over the hijab law. Democracy is not what most are asking for; many of the protest chants I've heard are some variation of "Bring back the Shah."
One wonders what might happen if the Iranians get their Shah and the economy continues to suck and the water in Tehran continues to not flow. I mean, the Pahlavi heir might be a nice guy (and is almost certainly nicer than who's currently occupying the not-exactly-a-throne in Tehran), but that doesn't necessarily mean he and his friends know how to run an economy. (Does anybody?) As for the drought, whether that ends isn't under the government's control. The new goverment might be able to build pipelines to bring in water from other parts of Iran, but its ability to do so will be constrained by the economy, which brings things back to the first problem....
A notionally pro-western government in Tehran will almost certainly get large western loans for the purpose of immediate legitimacy-building options, and Iran can pay those loans back with oil if they need to.
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Some of these are the result of vanilla idiotic theocracy, but I wouldn't downplay the influence of US sanctions on economic problems.
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They're a totalitarian Islamic state that has hostility to the US itself ("The Great Satan") as one of their basic principles. They're a major sponsor of terrorism and have long been engaging in a (mostly) proxy war against a US ally. The groypers may support the latter but for most US citizens I suspect all of these are bad.
As for their legitimacy, that's a internal matter. My impression is that aside from the more Westernized Iranians most of whom escaped, were driven out, or were killed in or after the revolution, the Iranian people do support them, but I could be wrong. I have been assuming the protests are sponsored by the letters C, I, and A.
To be fair, from the perspective of a random ME country, it is not clear to me that that assessment is categorically wrong.
If a foreign country half a world away backed a coup to install some autocrat, then a few years later offered broad support to your regional enemy while said enemy attacked you with chemical weapons, hammered you with sanctions for decades, broke treaties, invaded your neighbor and made a complete mess of things, and generally provided cover for a client-state who would freely bomb your military installations and murder your nuclear weapon scientists, then bomb your military installations themselves, you would likely also not like that country a lot.
Hell, when Reagan called the USSR an 'Evil Empire', they had done far less to the US.
The price for being the biggest sponsor of terror attacks on American soil clearly goes to Saudi Arabia for their links to Bin Laden.
That conflict is very much a two-way road. My considered opinion nowadays is that the Ayatollah and Nethanyahu richly deserve each other, and there is no reason for civilized countries to become entangled in their beef.
"US bad, actually" is a pretty common take, but
and
As for the "Evil Empire", regardless of what they did or didn't do to the US, the USSR was that; ask the Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Hungarians, and the survivors of the Prague Spring, among many others.
Oh, I am not doubting that. I am not some Holodomor denier.
I am also not saying that the net effect of the US is as atrocious as the net effect of the Ayatollah regime. FWIW, I consider the net effect of the US to be strongly positive from a global point of view. However, I would claim that if we only consider the territory of Iran, then the effect of the US seems pretty clearly net negative. The Ayatollah has certainly be worse from my PoV, but Iranians have little reason to like the US.
While I am sure that the Iranian hostage crisis was in some ways "unprecedented", I don't think it will even make the top 50 atrocities committed in the ME. Presumably the perception of the revolutionaries was that the Shah was basically a stooge, and the US the puppet masters. The people in the US embassy were working very hard to keep the Shah in power and Iran under the thumb of the US. Sure, the Shah had guaranteed them diplomatic immunity, and violating their embassy would be a defection from diplomatic norms, but it does not read to me as an act of pure evil. (With the benefit of hindsight, it was also very stupid on part of the revolutionaries. They gained nothing, antagonized a global superpower and also set themselves up for becoming a diplomatic pariah.)
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Iranians may not be pro-USA, but the youth disillusionment with the regime is very real. Look at pictures of the IRGC; they're all old.
Eh, the youth in the USA are disillusioned too.
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The large protests awhile ago in response to that woman being beaten to death in police captivity for not wearing her hijab suggests the regime is not as ideologically aligned with the public as they had hoped.
Additionally, the current unrest is based on material issues. Iran has a bad drought, bleak prospects for water security, is facing rising inflation on basic goods, their currency is devaluing and shop keepers are closing in protest.
I don't think you need to be on America's side to be a dissatisfied Iranian.
The never really were, Iran is what would have happened if the Bolsheviks had gotten stuck in the Soviet Twenties for fifty years.
I imagine the protests over the hijab girl being killed made everyone's private doubts public though.
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