Quick Thoughts on the War in Iran
some bullet points and such
The joint US/Israeli attack constitutes an unjust and criminal war of aggression – it’s that simple. This is true independently of what you think about the Iranian government or whether the world (or the Iranian people) would be better off if it were successfully toppled.
The self-defence rationale is laughable and embarrassing.
In the short term, the Iranian people living in Iran will suffer greatly. There are already reports of civilians being killed by the bombing campaign. They will also likely suffer even more under their government which will almost certainly ramp up its repression during the war.
The existing regime (The Islamic Republic of Iran under the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist) is very bad. It is an undemocratic, brutally repressive theocracy with widespread censorship. Apologists like to claim that Western governments violate human rights too, but it is ridiculous to think that any liberal democratic state represses its own citizens anywhere near as much as Iran does.
The West is perfectly happy to align itself with similarly repressive regimes, such as those in the Gulf and governments which do not grant voting rights to a people that it has been occupying for nearly sixty years like Israel. It is hard to take the neoconservative/liberal rationale for attacking Iran seriously when the same people making those arguments would balk at attacking Saudi Arabia.
Some people who have suffered greatly because of the Iranian government’s actions will obviously celebrate the strikes against it (See: Iranians, Ukrainians, Syrians, Sunnis, Kurds, the Baha’i, current and former hostages, Yemenis, Jews, Christians etc.). This is pretty understandable even if you think, as I do, that the war is wrong.
The Iranian government is not an ‘anti-imperialist government’. There is no such thing as an anti-imperialist government. Campists on the left like to think that the Iranian government is some force for peace and justice because they are geopolitically aligned against the US, Israel, the Gulf States etc. but Iran has simply been pursuing what its government sees as its own geopolitical goals. The Iranian government also played a key role in propping up Assad’s brutal regime in Syria and has been aiding Russia in their criminal invasion of Ukraine, but such things will be ignored by campists who are incapable of understanding geopolitics outside of their Cold War ‘good guys (who can do no wrong) vs bad guys’ frame.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution, despite what some will tell you, was about a lot more than the 1953 MI6 and CIA coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh. It does, however, demonstrate that toppling a hostile regime and installing a friendly one can backfire catastrophically in the long run.
The Trump government is openly embracing the idea that their attacks against other countries have nothing to do with nation-building or spreading democracy. You have people like Stephen Miller openly bragging that the US can do whatever it wants and that they are solely interested in humiliating unfriendly regimes. The doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ did at least put some constraints on adventurism and, at least at one point, came with some expectation that the US would invest in building new state institutions.
Even if regime change results in a more democratic and pro-Western government, I worry that its neighbours and by extension its neighbour’s allies will still see Iran as a geopolitical threat and a rival.
A non-trivial number of readers will have stopped reading after the first three bullet points and will be upset with me for ‘defending the regime’.
A non-trivial number of readers will have read through the whole thing, but will ignore most of the bullet points and be upset with me for being a ‘lapdog of Western imperialism’.