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Notes -
You are wrong.
There are levels to shit holes. It around the levels of modern day Egypt, and would be doing better if it hadn't been sanctioned into the ground. In the 2010s (well into the Ayatollah's regime), they were around 80th in GDP per capita. That's solidly middle-economy alongside nations like Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa. China only surpassed them in 2012-13.
You can't call every non-OECD nation a shit-hole. Iran still sits above China in the HDI index at a comfortably above average number.
Have you seen photos of their major cities ? They look more developed than many tier-2 American cities. 1 2 3
If I could be a architecture nerd for a second, their modernist brick work is some of the prettiest & most original of the recent past. [4] 5.
As do many of US's allies. UAE is funding genocide in Sudan. The US itself was happy to fund the Mujaheddin as long as they were terrorists allied with the US. Pakistan's entire thing is to fund terrorists, and the US has continued being friendly.
Oh yeah, we're about to start doubting if Persia was ever a great empire.
Yeah Persians are way more organized and productive than the vast majority of the region. Turks might be able to compete, and other groups just can't really do functional society in absence of massive Oil lottery wins.
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I’m not doubting Persia - the last 15 years have made me doubt we know fuck all about the past.
Comparing gdp to Thailand seems a bit much, yea? Thailand isn’t run by religious nutters that fund terrorism. It’s not yelling death to America as a winning political strat. It’s just a lower middle class country.
Iran isn’t.
I am extremely confident that if America had sanctioned Thailand off from the global economy, put out a document titled "Which path to Siam" which explained they needed to wipe out all of Thailand's neighbours before invading them, wiped out all of Thailand's neighbours as they explained in their openly published plan on how to invade Thailand and then blew up 150 Thai schoolgirls that Thailand would actually be yelling "Death to America" at the top of their lungs.
America didn’t make Islam a death cult.
Islam was attacking the American navy almost before America was America.
What does that have to do with the point I was making? I'm very confident that a Christian, Jewish or Taoist nation would engage in violent warfare in response to those provocations.
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