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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   8477 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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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.

Trump really needs to intervene militarily here now. Destroy the Revolutionary Guards headquarters and take out their top brass. This minimizes deaths of Iranian people. Falsely telling the Iranian people that he'd help so they risk their lives and die only for Trump to later back out and allow the regime to continue would be an abject moral failure.

If Trump can properly fix Venezuela, Iran and Cuba by replacing their regimes with sane governments he'll genuinely deserve the Nobel peace prize.

Because all the PREVIOUS US interventions in the Middle East in general and Iran in particular have gone SO well.

You can argue we didn't intervene enough.

How much better off would the world be if Jimmy Carter hadn't been a leftist simp and he'd gone all in on keeping the Shah in power in 1979, instead of the Islamists and commies?

We should have done Operation Ajax 2.0 if anything.

I don't think rented mobs and planted newspaper articles would have prevented the Islamic Revolution. People seem to forget that the Shah still controlled the police and military in 1953, and the issue was that he didn't feel like he had the popular support to use them to take out Mossadeh. In 1979 he was deposed despite having that power tenfold and not being afraid to use it. Propaganda making the Ayatollah look bad wasn't going to stop that tidal wave.

He was actually afraid to use it.

The West told him to treat the opposition with kid gloves and facilitated Khomeini's return.

A mistake the current regime will not make.

Which is why we should bomb 'em I say.

Make it more of a fair fight.

Kuwait was a great success, in that the US achieved all its stated goals and Kuwait is today a rich, stable, pro-American state that acts as a crucial hub for US military operations in the Middle East. But Kuwait is also much easier to invade than Iran is.

You mean when we restored the House of al-Sabah, just deposed by Iraq? Sure, that worked out OK, but it was a much different sort of intervention, and part of a larger one which didn't go so well.

Look, I understand that Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were glorious boondoggles. But Iran is not just a American enemy (or heck, an Israeli one.) It's an incompetent regime. One that has run out of money and electricity and water. You can't shoot your way out of a drought. One way or another, Iran is going to explode. The calculus has shifted - not because of the CIA or Mossad, but because of nature. Regime change will happen regardless of what Americans do or do not do, so getting ahead of the curve and allying ourselves with the Iranians who have already endured and sacrificed so much is smart.

The Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and Assad were not so short-sighted and stupid enough to run out of water. The mullahs of Iran and the IRGC are so incompetent they grow rice in the desert from water captured from dams they themselves built because they are stupid. They ignored the advice of their own scientists because of greed and that is why they are falling now - systematic incompetence on every level. Intervening now will save the world an Iranian refugee crisis down the line, far larger than the Syrian one.

Look, I understand that Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were glorious boondoggles.

Iraq actually went rather well by these standards. And it's still shit.

It's an incompetent regime.

The Soviets were incompetent for 70 years. I mean, to the point of holding all of Ukraine and STILL not being able to feed themselves. Still took a leader not willing to massacre his way out to allow it to fall. The Iranian regime is still willing to massacre its way out.

Iraq's pretty fine.

Unless the Shia clerics can drink blood and summon rain, you can't kill your way out of having no water. The Islamic Republic has foolishly pushed themselves into a position where no amount of force will overcome its problems. It reminds me of Xerxes whipping the ocean for its insolence. One hundred million people living in a mountainous desert can't be denied water. Even the Soviets - hell, even the North Koreans and the Khmer Rouge - did not run out of water.

I can't overstate enough how incompetent you have to be to overlook this very obvious problem, of their own making. If the Iranian opposition starts getting denied water, they have literally nothing to lose but their lives - which their evil government is determined to do by dehydration and starvation. Just to make sure... you do know that humans require water to live, right?

The humanitarian catastrophe is already priced in: intervention is the difference between a impoverished but recovering democracy and an atrocity on par with the Great Leap Forward.

Even the Soviets did not run out of water.

The Aral Sea begs to differ.

Unless the Shia clerics can drink blood and summon rain, you can't kill your way out of having no water.

They don't have literally zero water. And killing indeed reduces demand, though it's unlikely they'll kill enough to make a dent.

If the Iranian opposition starts getting denied water, they have literally nothing to lose but their lives - which their evil government is determined to do by dehydration and starvation.

So the government simply reserves what water it has for its security forces, and the dehydrated and starving people are easier to kill.

The humanitarian catastrophe is already priced in: intervention is the difference between a impoverished but recovering democracy and an atrocity on par with the Great Leap Forward.

Note that the regime which did the Great Leap Forward is still in power.

Unless the Shia clerics can drink blood and summon rain, you can't kill your way out of having no water.

North Korea has survived famines without a regime change, and they can't drink blood and summon rain.

A famine isn't a drought. People can go without food for a month, very uncomfortably. People without water for a month are dead.

Iraq actually went rather well by these standards. And it's still shit.

Iraq is doing about as well as a non-GCC Arab country can do for now. Judged against its peers, it’s got good growth, a functioning economy with real median income having increased a lot in the last decade, and as a basket case of ethnic tensions between Sunni Arabs, Shias and Kurds it’s being vaguely held together with comparatively minimal violence.

In general though I agree with your point.

so getting ahead of the curve and allying ourselves with the Iranians who have already endured and sacrificed so much is smart.

I am very seriously concerned that overtly intervening will cause the protest movement to lose face and legitimacy. Merely offering verbal support to a revolutionary movement and or even arming it generates less risk of creating an appearance that it is merely an American puppet regime than airstrikes or a ground intervention. Now admittedly this is a position I hold from ignorance, but we have reliable evidence such as outside polling showing that e.g. a majority of Iranians support US airstrikes against the regime, then I have not heard of it.

The fact that they are calling for a return of the Shah with a straight face is a pretty big sign that they already have no legitimacy.

How many Iranians are old enough to actually remember life under the Shah? It's all Boomer fairytales to those young enough to fight, like the 50's suburbs are to American NEETs.

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