The Problem in Iran
I am not going to get into any ethical or legal arguments about the decapitation raids on Iran. I don't have the time or the heart to do it right now. I couldn't be more thrilled to see the leadership of Iran eliminated but the legal basis for all this is slim. Of course every President this century has done something similar, sometimes with far less provocation, so the precedent train already left the station long ago. I will, however, offer one practical issue.
The US is really good at getting rid of leaders like this, and if anything is getting better. I won't go further back than my lifetime, but the Diem coup (and execution) in South Vietnam, the lukewarm (at best) support for the Shah of Iran that contributed to his ouster, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Afghanistan invasion, Gaddafi in Libya, Maduro in Venezuela, Noriega in Panama -- the list goes on. But in many or most of these cases, what followed the US-led decapitation was as bad or worse than what came before. Vietnam - equally bad or worse. Iran - worse. Iraq - better but took a really long commitment. Afghanistan - at least as bad or worse. Venezuela - unknown but no immediate revolution as hoped. Libya - much worse. Panama - probably better.
We have no historically successful roadmap to go by, and in a sense this may be a situation like Hayek's critique of government planning -- that a perfect roadmap cannot exist because we don't understand the mass of individuals we are "liberating", or even how they define "liberated', or even if they really want to be "liberated." As all of us humans do, we project our own preferences and outlooks and assumptions on people where they may well not fit at all.
Even beyond the job of seeing Iran no longer acting as a leading agent of chaos, I would greatly love to see their people liberated. Women in Iran who were just emerging into the 20th Century under the Shah's leadership have a chance to emerge from gender apartheid again, and I am 100% hoping to see this. (I wrote a while back about the utter lunacy of US women on the Left consistently siding with hardcore Islam and ignoring the plight of women in these countries).
Unfortunately for my optimism, I said the exact same thing, almost word for word, when we invaded Iraq. Iraq has since struggled to fulfill this promise, though to be fair a lot of the blame for that rests not on US failures or the Iraqis but on the ongoing efforts by Iran to subvert the country and keep it roiled in chaos. But getting there took a HUGE US commitment of money and lives, way more than a pushbutton decapitation of the leadership.
A parting thought -- there is clearly an Iranian opposition. We have seen them bravely marching in the streets (far braver than our anti-fascists here as they faced actual imprisonment and death for such protests against real fascists). This is an honest question -- around whom does the Iranian opposition rally and organize? As in many such authoritarian societies, only the authorities have organization. So even decapitated, the military and former government theoretically have a huge head start in pulling things together under their control in the aftermath than an unorganized populace. This is the same problem faced by many post-colonial governments. It's not that their populace wanted a military dictatorship when the colonizer left or was thrown out, but in many cases the only organized and educated group in the country was the military which stepped into the vacuum. I am not an expert on this but I have always assumed India escaped this fate because it had a relatively large, educated group of indigenous people trained in government and not in the military.
Postscript: I continue to find it sort of hilarious that media that go out of their way not to deadname a transexual teen insist on describing Iran as part of the Arab world and their citizens as Arabs. I can tell you with great confidence and many experiences that there is no way to piss off an Iranian faster than to call them an Arab.
Attributed to Good Queen Bess: I dislike war. The outcome is uncertain and the expense is great.
The level of discourse about the war on TV is beyond the pale, and I couldn't agree with the postscript any more strongly.
There are some very real internal US problems with the executive violating the law about getting the US into a war, but that's for our side to eventually address.
The other side, the "we're going in without a plan, burn up a few billion of the military stockpile and then throw up our hands and call the job done before any real change happens", now, that's a part I have real issues with.
We've are now committed, and if all we get out of it is the same type of people running the same type of horrible regime, then we have failed everyone.
I've always wondered why feminists in the West dress up as handmaids to make some kind of point. What point is that? There are no authorities in the world currently making women dress up as handmaids.
Why don't they dress up in burqas instead? Plenty of women forced to put those on.
100%. They are Persian, not Arab.
Back in the 1980s when I read
one thing that struck me was how the Iranian bureaucracy was remaining intact and were the ones holding the EDS executives in jail. Perhaps the bureaucrats will choose wiser this time.
Unfortunately, the women in 1979 were major forces in bringing in the Islamic State. They were still mad because wearing veils had been banned in 1936.
I remembered the many women who were involved in the embassy occupation so I went searching and yes, the grandmothers and great-grandmothers of the young women in gender apartheid today protested for that world.
'Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution' October 13, 1997, Wilson Center
The Iranian opposition that gets most of the attention is educated, urban, cosmopolitan, and (relatively) democracy-minded. It lives in the large cities, and is prominent among the Iranians that most westerners encounter. It is easy to make oneself believe that they represent a majority of Iranians. However, as with the Arabs, they represent perhaps five percent of the population, and would have essentially no support if they were to somehow try to take power. We're not likely to end up with a better Iranian regime than the one we had, even if the current regime collapses from so many deaths at the top.