Prannon wrote: ↑2020-01-06 08:27pm
A better question is why target any of them at all?
I might be a dumb idiot, but honestly, this all reeks of personal grudges - of many types - that a bunch of old people want to settle before they die.
<soapbox>
Of all the countries in the Middle East, Iran is a far better partner to have than any of the others except maybe for Turkey and Israel. Or could have been. Potentially. Maybe. Distantly. With some actual leadership, diplomacy, and a strategy.
It's a country of institutions, elections, councils and what not. Fragile and hollow, but they're there. Those things have some sort of continuity when people pass out of office and/or die. Maybe they could have been encouraged, respected, and built upon in time in a less isolated Iran. Maybe the more repressive parts of the regime could have been reformed away. Iran's not above electing reformers after all. Most of the rest of the region are a bunch of repressive theocratic monarchies that'll flip this way and that as soon as the throne passes from one person to another.
Buuut no. That isn't going to happen now. We gotta settle the scores I guess and ruin our geopolitical position in the region to satisfy some 50 year old grudges. :/ All at the same time that the powers that be dismantle the current economic order of things. Also at the same time that climate change is about to get really really real. Great environment to go starting a personal vendetta war in. Just great.
</soapbox>
The "more repressive parts of the regime" have been quite willing to gun down and disappear protesters before now, and they maintain, through the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a means of exerting power and engaging in violence that is outside the purview of the secular state. They have also been consistently willing to do the exact same things that left-wing people rightly castigate Saudi Arabia for- fund brutally violent governments in their efforts to crush dissenters (Syria), fund and support violent paramilitaries that exploit hostility towards Israel to carry out campaigns of more general terror (Lebanon), attempt to hijack civil government through the use of violent paramilitaries and the deliberate stoking of a civil war (Iraq)- the list goes on.
Broadly speaking, the fundamental problem with American foreign policy in Southwest Asia and North Africa is that we operate under racist axiomatic principles. For someone like MKSheppard, this means that Iran is quite simply clay to be molded as we wish. For less bloodthirsty people, this means that we look for kinder, gentler oppressors who will keep the masses of the Muslim world (as we understand it) from achieving political power and using that against us. And thus, the emphasis on how Mohammad bin Salman was a "reformer", the insistence that Iran and the US are "natural allies", the American support for Hosni Mubarak and the Assads...
The only way out, then, is to side ourselves with the people and not with the states, both as individuals and as political actors. Which in turn would demand that we take positive actions beyond just negative actions like blowing people up or sending troops out to shoot them. That is to say, we need to be willing to work as helpers towards the liberation of oppressed people, not as saviors wielding a flaming sword or judges come to pluck out new leaders to set over the people.