By rational you mean accept the British, US and Israeli rule and the "liberal" democracy of give up your military and give us your oil and market.

Your perspective on who is being liberated and who is doing the liberating relies on a simplistic narrative. Ironically, the central figure of that narrative, Donald Trump, has openly stated that he does not mind seizing oil or returning the nation to the Dark Ages. Furthermore, they have backed armed protests and expressed a willingness to arm Kurdish factions.

I am uncertain about the logic or framework you are utilizing. If you believe such actions constitute "freeing" a country, then we clearly do not share the same moral and ethical standards.

So, does that mean that Kremlin is freeing a country..?

which directly led in no small way to the overthrow of the French monarchy.

Perhaps US involvemet in arming rebels elsewhere might led to the downfall of the current US ruling class also?

Iran is not a jihadist nor a nuke state. The US attempted to isolate Iran from the world, and tried to make everyone its enemy.

They certainly gave them a very hard push in that direction due to their coup in 1953. Do you also think 9/11 happened because of US freedom?

Are you suggesting I provide a citation for the President's claims? Beyond his reputation as a loose cannon, it is difficult to fathom why he would boast about such a thing.

From the beginning, the primary objective of this conflict has been for Israel to eliminate regional resistance, leaving Iran as the final holdout. By arming internal rebels to oppose the administration, external forces are essentially inciting a civil war to topple the government.

While the nation and its current leadership require reform, it is important to remember that these radical regimes do not emerge in a vacuum. Their perceived need to resist stems from external efforts to dismantle them. Such radicalization is often the direct consequence of aggressive policies, including economic sanctions, historical support for Saddam Hussein, and the installation of corrupt monarchies.

Every radical movement triggers a counter-movement, making it difficult to distinguish cause from effect. Much like the chills and fever associated with the flu, these movements represent an extreme but instinctive immune response to an outside threat.

Man, if you've followed Iran, you'll know that some exile Iranians are a bit like exile Cubans. Like the latter, they have plenty of legitimate things to be angry about, but that doesn't mean they aren't, a good deal of them, batshit crazy. Lots of them support the son of the CIA-supported dictator who was so bad he landed Iran with their theocrats in the first place. Some of them are supporters of MEK, a goddamn case study in political cults.

> This is what the regime says every time large protests erupt internally

Yes, but that doesn't mean they're not right. US and particularly Israel outright took credit for it, to a degree you'd be hard pressed to find any time in history. It wasn't just a spontaneous uprising, it was also very openly a foreign sponsored regime change operation.

Which doesn't mean they're aren't a lot of innocent people who have wanted to get rid of the theocrats all along getting murdered. I'm sure there are.

There are just enough in the opposition who have decided to ally with Israel (which would rather see Iran a Somalia-style failed state before a free and democratic Iran) and the dictator's sonthat any kind of moral legitimacy the movement could have had is out the window.

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Gemini said The point isn't that one side is "good." The point is that your binary notion of bad and good is far too simplistic for this reality. We are talking about nuclear powers threatening to send a country of 90 million people to the dark ages just to seize their oil and resources. Radicalism is not born in a vacuum; it is an extreme yet necessary immune reaction to an invader. When you are facing a genocide level threat, the moral calculus is not actually that hard. If you can't see the difference between internal policy flaws and a superpower threatening total destruction, then you aren't being objective. You are just taking a side with the party holding the bigger hammer.

The US should do better. But we got here when the parent said: > I don't understand how any human in good faith could look at Iran's government and say they are the evil regime,

Iran's government mows down protestors by the 10's of thousands. They beat woman to death for violating the dress code. They conduct public hangings in stadiums. They routinely use torture and arbitrary arrests. They and their proxies bombard civilians routinely. They recruit child soldiers. The list is just endless. How is that even comparable to the US government?

https://iranhumanrights.org/2024/03/crimes-against-humanity-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drowning_of_Afghan_refugees_in...

https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-af...

https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/03/1134782

It's not confirmed but I agree it was very likely a US strike. An accidental one.

Assuming the US did not intend to kill school girls that is also not a war crime. You can certainly argue that this happened due to the US decision to go to war and claim the actions to not be moral (or illegal as some have stated). Others might argue that more harm would occur if no action was taken and that the action minimizes the overall harm (e.g. to the Iranian people or others).

You could also argue that attack was intentional. I don't think there's any evidence of that and I'm not sure what purpose it served if it was one.

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You might be right. You're definitely right there are legal arguments to support that.

> "Foreign coup attempt" is an extraordinary claim that is not backed by publicly available evidence

It is not an extraordinary claim, and it's backed by absurdly strong evidence. As I said, it was pretty ridiculous that Mossad openly said not just that they wanted regime change (as the US also did), but that they were actively assisting in it. And in addition to the thousands of protesters who have been reported dead, hundreds of policemen or revolutionary guards have also been reported dead.

An ordinary, popular protest, even a damn angry one - even one armed with handguns! - does not kill hundreds of policemen. If you think that's possible, you don't understand the power difference between civilians and people with a full time job and training to use violence on civilians. Even if you would ignore the public statements (which I won't let you!) you simply do not succeed at killing so much of the state's violence apparatus without serious material and organizational support.

And anyone who's been following Iran for a while knows that yes, Mossad actually has shockingly many native agents in Iran (e.g. the murder of scientists wouldn't have been possible without it) and in addition there are political cults like MEK, and supporters of the dictator son Pahlavi, who are certainly organized and certainly not pacifist in their fight against the government.

It's your loyal party line messaging which is detached from reality.

To be honest, this forum is where I come to take th temperature of the US "centrists" who brought us to this point. I've quit other social media, so this is one of the few places where I can hear what folks (who are often quite clever in quite a few dimensions) spout rather vicious thoughts.

The other spot I get exposure to this part of the US political spectrum is the comment section of a youtube guy who is pretty far to the right but who has a seemingly (at least to me) well-informed understanding of the facts- he's interesting because it's kind of wild to hear the more lumpen version of this site and what their concerns are: they are really mad that this war is happening instead of further domestic crackdowns on immigration.

In both cases, it's helpful to understand where folks who have some pretty misinformed understandings of history and politics are sitting with their opinions.

It doesn't seem surprising to me that a bunch of aspiring venture capitalists, who have probably have been or are on the cusp of having a small taste of the massive wealth that their work in building out the surveillance state has brought to their masters, have totally shitty politics.