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New culture war news, from the secret squirrel cloak and dagger part of culture war.
And it is top tier blockbuster spy thriller tale. Tom Clancy might be dead, but his spirit is marching on.
Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Cultivate Ahmadinejad
Inside the Mossad Plot to Install Israel's Arch-enemy Ahmadinejad as Iran's Leader
True if big, but is it big enough? What is really going on?
1/ All true news, you can always trust NYT and Haaretz. No one can resist Mossad grooming, even old revolutionary and God fearing true Muslim like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. All resistance is futile.
2/ All fake news, designed both to enhance Mossad reputation and depress Iranian morale. If even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was traitor recruited by the Zionist entity, who can be trusted? All resistance is futile.
Any way, Israel looks strong, but far from all powerful.
I wish they had succeeded, if only for what a great story it would have been.
If you think that flipping and installing Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela (or installing and flipping, although it looks increasingly like she flipped first) is a shining example of the new Trumpy way of war, it is an obvious thing to try. The main problem is the lack of an obvious route to get Ahmadinejad installed as leader.
As a pro-regime "democratic" politician in a fake democracy, Ahmadinejad had one job - to legitimise the regime using the methods of democratic politics. Ultimately he wasn't very good at it, which makes him useless. Stary Lee had the same problem in Hong Kong.
The problem is that Venezuela is not Iran and Iran is not Venezuela.
Bolivarismo/Chavismo was never about anything more than gibs, there was not even patriotic pretense to make Venezuela great for the first time ever. When it turned out that no gibs will be coming any more, no one was willing to die for this great cause.
In Iran, there are tens of millions who believe in the Prophet, Ali, Hassan and Husayn, who remember Ashura and Revolution, and they really mean it.
There really were millions of Venezuelan indigenous from the shanty towns who fully believed in Chavez and Chavismo. That’s why the early right wing CIA coup in 2002 was defeated, they came down from the hills and forced him back into power.
But the oil crash in 2014 and subsequent decade of low oil prices killed the client economy he had created. Maduro was also far less charismatic and moderately less competent (although Chavez’ competence was overstated when oil was above $90 a barrel). Followers only stay around you for so long when the money dries up.
By contrast, while Tehran and a handful of other cities in Iran had a moderately developed middle class and semi-advanced economy in 1979, most of the country was essentially very poor rural peasants, smallholders and workers in large towns and cities living in places without any significant development at all, and in some cases with lives little changed for centuries. The first shoots of sustained economic development had sprouted but it was early days, like Russia before 1917.
While these people participate much in the revolution itself, they nevertheless became its core constituency; all development their communities have had since 1979, the social housing, schools, universities, economic development, for them has been a product of it. They can’t remember, and have never been able to remember, good times before it.
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