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Notes -
Operation Poseidon Archer
Reported by CNN:
I have mixed feelings about this. It is clearly the responsibility of the imperial hegemon to protect global shipping lanes. But by that same logic, it's time for the imperial hegemon to force a settlement onto the Israelis due to their never-ending destabilization of the region. That would entail the EU forcing a peace onto Israel, performing a Special Military Operation within Israel if necessary.
Bring back the 117 AD borders, with EU administration of Jerusalem. Jews may live in Jerusalem, wail at their wall and study Torah in peace, but it is utterly nonsensical for the West to continue to bear the burden of Israeli destabilization of the region.
This washy middle ground of appealing to imperial obligations when it comes to Middle Eastern intervention, without control of the "vassal" state destabilizing the region, is a never-ending pattern that has to stop. The US and EU has more than enough leverage to force a settlement onto Israel.
Israel was well on the way to coming to an understanding with its neighbors prior to 10/7.
The role of the global hegemon here, if we're really talking about 'just do whatever creates stability' would be take the population of Palestine, break it up into families, and scatter them around the globe, then decapitate the regime in Tehran and hand the reins over to a transitional government and leave. The Middle East would calm down very quickly.
What keeps the replacement government from rather quickly becoming just as hostile as the current government?
Dunno, but Iran has had several waves of very large scale anti-regime protests. I think you could prevent something exactly like the Mullahs taking back over if you just hand the government over to the right people. Iran isn't really like Iraq, it's a more developed place, even with the sanctions.
The current government of Iran has a very deep organization; just beheading it won't do. As for the protests, they're probably astroturfed Western-backed events anyway.
If Western governments had the reach to mobilize the failed protest movements Iran has had over the last decade, we'd have just overthrown the Guardian council and been done with it.
Setting up a few people to protest and then be suppressed by the regime is a far lesser problem than actually overthrowing the regime.
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Do you have any source for that or did you just make it up? The government wouldn't need to be so draconian if it really thought it had broad support for it's policies. The Islamist faction gained power through a coup and quickly suppressed it's rivals who helped it gain power.
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I guess it's a selected sample, but they seem very popular among the recent Iranian immigrants that I know, and they report widespread support back home.
That doesn't matter, it's impossible to prove that a particular movement is not astroturfed. False consciousness arguments are in full effect.
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