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Notes -
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.
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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