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Trump has given a "red line" to Iran about killing protestors, but we still aren't seeing US involvement as deaths move into the thousands, reportedly. If the regime follows through with its claims, it will be executing many if not most of the thousands it has arrested.
I have an essay on my view that the US/West/Israel should clearly intervene in the Transnational Thursday thread, but the Culture War dynamics strike me as interesting in that it's not really Culture War Classic material. Traditionally, the Left has been soft on Iran and the Right has been hawkish. Iran has tried to kill Trump and Trump officials, as revenge for the Soleimani assassination.
There's a strong anti-interventionist Right and Left. During the 12-Day War, Trump went from tweeting about regime change, to abruptly demanding cessation of hostilities, which Israel and Iran complied with. (I think had the war continued the regime would already have fallen, given how easily Israel was bombing them.) This is something that's already kicked off, unlike the Maduro rendition. My understanding is that action got more popular in the polls having succeeded, though it's an open question what Venezuela's fate will be.
The Right strongly criticized Obama for declaring a red line in Syria, and then backing off. In hindsight, I think it would have been correct to have intervened against Assad. Here, I think there's a clear cost-benefit analysis case, whether you care about the plight of the Iranian people or the amoral realist power dynamics for America First Global Superpower Edition.
I don't think the pro-establishment left has been particularly soft on Iran - although I agree at the margin the pro-establishment right has been more hawkish recently (see for example the Obama era nuclear deal).
I agree here - I think "pro-establishment = hawkish, anti-establishment = dovish" is a better model than "left = dovish, right = hawkish". Trump personally is an exception because he is close to both Israel and Saudi Arabia in a way which the anti-establishment right would disapprove of in anyone else.
There is also a model where the US factional politics of Iran is just the US factional politics of Israel. The pro-establishment left and right are pro-Israel and thus anti-Iran, the anti-establishment left is anti-Israel and thus pro-Iran, and the anti-establishment right is divided on Iran in ways which primarily reflect their attitudes to Israel and Jews.
Eh, I think very few members of the Establishment Left have been anything other than pretty soft of Iran.
For example, I think many of the hawkish criticisms of Obama and the JCPOA ("they wanted to give Iran nukes") are unfair (I supported it), but then there's Ben Rhodes...
The national security-focused Dems are usually pretty sane overall imo. The types who will say it's great Maduro is out of power, for example.
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