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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.
If Americans actually cared about Iranians they would stop trying to turn Iran into Syria. Relieve the sanctions, stop trying to steal the oil and work for peace. Another fiasco regime change war that will flood Europe with migrants and that will wreck Iran is the worst possible outcome.
In hindsight the policy of arming jihadists while trying to sanction every aspect of the Syrian economy ended in a genocide of Syria's christian population and Europe getting flooded by migrants. If anything the west should prop up stable regimes in the middle east. Wasting another trillion trying to occupy a country in the middle east so they can get DEI would be a disastrous policy.
The recent fiasco in Yemen failed because bombing doesn't win wars. The newly installed jihadist in Syria barely controls the country. The Iraq war was a complete fiasco as well as Afghanistan. How many failures does it take before the neocons stop?
Do you routinely hear people complain about the Iranian diaspora?
Something to that, I reckon.
Who's saying anything about an occupation?
I swear to god so many people have brainworms that any potential foreign intervention must be directly compared to the interventions in Iraq or Afghanistan. There are other ways to do things than occupying and nation building. (Also, Iraq is doing ok these days.)
It's not just Iraq and Afghanistan, it's also Syria and Libya (that I remember off the top of my head). Also I'd be more ok with your idea if anyone was punished for these blunders, and gave the current batch of pro-intervention people something to think about.
Those are better comparisons for sure.
Syria is a case of a LACK of Western intervention, however. Assad got a ton of support from Russia and Iran, which is why he really started losing when both of those countries had to focus on more immediate problems.
Libya is pretty different from Iran in a host of ways. For one, Gaddafi wasn't a major thorn in our side at the time. The Islamic regime is an ongoing threat that could be removed.
In my essay, I talk about the risk of separatism. You can't have a perfect future guaranteed. The most successful military intervention the US ever did, according to most anyway, was WWII. Which ended up leading to the Cold War with the USSR as our primary enemy, and then the rise of China. Whoops.
In my view, this case seems fairly straightforward once you consider the possible outcomes relative to baseline. The Islamic regime is really bad for Iran and the world.
The leading alternatives to Assad were Al Qaeda and ISIS. It seems patently obvious that the Western-backed forces were objectively worse in nearly every way compared to Assad unless you're a Salafist, an Erdogan fan or an Israel-prioritizer (as in, elevating the narrow interests of Israel above all other considerations).
Assad is a major ally of Iran and Russia, traditional enemies of the US.
So far the Al Qaeda guy seems better than Assad.
Iran and Russia are only enemies of the American regime, Al Qaeda is an enemy of the American people.
The Al Qaeda guy is currently having ethnic and religious minorities thrown off of buildings, is that better than Assad?
Oh, I think Iran and Russia are just as much enemies of the American people as Al Qaeda is.
Regardless, can we do the math on how many people was Assad killing? I think it was more.
There's no great option here.
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