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I never understood why Americans consider Iran the enemy and Saudi Arabia the friend. Iran is a democracy, they appear to have legit elections, while Saudi is a

I never understood why Americans consider Iran the enemy and Saudi Arabia the friend. Iran is a democracy, they appear to have legit elections, while Saudi is an absolute monarchy. Iranian women enjoy way better equality compared to Saudi Arabian women. As a software developer in the US I have even come across Iranian-born women software engineers. Iranians seem more modern in ever way. Citizens of both countries seem to hate America, but ordinary Iranian citizens never did a 911-style attack on the US. Is it because of historical reasons that Saudis are the friend and Iranians the enemy?

ink_13 5y ago
> they appear to have legit elections You might want to research this point more deeply.
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  The 'legit elections' or the 'they [...] have' part?
- nickik 5y ago
  The elections are legit, but you need to be vetted to be allowed to run and the position you gain is not all that powerful.
nemothekid 5y ago
>Citizens of both countries seem to hate America, but ordinary Iranian citizens never did a 911-style attack on the US. Is it because of historical reasons that Saudis are the friend and Iranians the enemy? The real quick spark notes are: Iran tried to socialize their Oil Production as they believed that Irani's deserved more than 10% of the profit generated instead of just paying Britain forever. In response the CIA did a coup d'état and there's been instability ever since. Naturally the US aligned itself with it's own oil company in the region (California-Arabian Standard Oil, which is now the Aramco) given that it had just made an enemy of Iran. I think a pretty weird quirk of history is that if you squint hard enough Aramco is technically a Silicon Valley startup, with beginnings in San Francisco that was one of the largest IPOs of 2020.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Imagine this: In England, the Queen decides to dissolve the parliament - which she has the absolute right to do. Boris says "No, I'm the boss now". The USA sends in some aid for the Queen and helps get Boris out of there, so the Queen can re-set up a new government. Did the Queen/US commit a coup d'etat? Or did Boris commit the coup and try to become a dictator by not stepping down when legally required to? That is exactly what happened in Iran, if you replace "Queen" with "Shah" and "Boris" with "Mossadegh".
  - yongjik 5y ago
    I don't know what answer you are expecting, but realistically(?) speaking, the world will absolutely lose their mind if America installs its favorite leader on the UK. That kind of shit is what superpowers do onto countries like Iran or Afghanistan, not in Western Europe.
    - sceadu 5y ago
      That's not the point of his example...
  - nemothekid 5y ago
    >The USA sends in some aid for the Queen ... That is exactly what happened in Iran This seem disingenuous as you completely remove the motivations of the actors. You forgot the part where the US bribes the queen to dissolve the parliament so that Boris doesn't nationalize British Petroleum. That's a HUGE detail that you are handwaving away. So yes, if the US bribed the queen to dissolve parliament because the people of UK democratically decided to nationalize BP, that would be a very bad thing even though the queen "has the absolute right to do" so.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > You forgot the part where the US bribes the queen to dissolve the parliament so that Boris doesn't nationalize British Petroleum Also the part where the CIA pays for and stages a coup attempt just so that it can use it as a pretext to use other forces that it is also paying to suppress the armed uprising on behalf of the Queen, with the resulting security situation being the public pretext used for the disillusion of parliament.
emilsedgh 5y ago
> Citizens of both countries seem to hate America Absolutely not. Middle and upper class Iranians absolutely love America. Never been to Saudi but I doubt their people hate America as well. (I agree with the rest of your comment though) Source: Iranian
- noaccnt 5y ago
  "Middle and upper class Iranians absolutely love America." So, as a generalization for most of the country, his statement is correct. Unless you dismiss the lower classes as disposable riffraff as the Shah did.
  - emilsedgh 5y ago
    His statement is not correct. First, a massive portion of the population (middle and upper class) are also considerable and they _dont_ hate America. Second, the working class doesn't hate America. I was born and grown up in Iran and I've never seen _anyone_ actually having strong negative feelings towards the US. I don't think Iranian working class thinks about US as much as Americans are lead to believe.
    - noaccnt 5y ago
      Summary Look, I happen to have a very high opinion of Iranians and Iranian society. I think you are one of the most sophisticated people in the world (though, note, sophisticated and sophism share the same root ;). I think the Ayatollahs have, in many ways, perverted Iranian society (in others ways ensured it's independence). But your statement is too simple, too lacking in nuance. It is, frankly, dangerous (but I'll defend your right to share them with my life!) in the same way that statements about Iraqi's perception of America were 20 years ago. Long Version: "I was born and grown up in Iran " I figured, but I didn't want to bring it up; if you're going to talk about "lived experiences" then it's fair that I ask you what your social class you belong to in Iran. Were you the son/daughter of an engineer? Or were you the child of a manual laborer? Did you grow up in Tehran, or Shiraz? Or did you grow up in a small village in the middle of nowhere? Did you have foreign DVDs when you grew up? More succinctly, did your class make or was it depicted in "Children of Heaven"? (deserved the Oscar, btw. It was brilliant) "First, a massive portion of the population (middle and upper class) are also considerable" Well, doesn't that implies that the Ayatollahs did well by Iran? In the times of the Shah the middle class was proportionally small, certainly not large enough to make OP's comment wrong. (The answer is no, the Ayatollahs were a disaster and Iran's middle class, even if it numbers in the millions, is still a small fraction of the total population) " and they _dont_ hate America." OK, here I'll concede you're probably partially right but only because "America" is very ill defined. How can someone "hate" Akron OH? You can despise them, but hate? Ohioans are the nicest people I've met in the world (lived experience from growing up in four continents)! But, typically, when ppl talk about hating "America" they are referring to DC and DC's policies.
mullingitover 5y ago
Yep, no matter how monstrous your human rights record is, no matter how big of a kleptocracy your government is, the US will be your ally as long as you give the US suzerain authority and play ball with US corporations. There's no end to the human rights abuses the US will overlook if you're willing to play ball. Iran is in the doghouse because they nationalized their oil, same as Venezuela. Cuba under the US-backed Batista dictatorship makes the current communist regime there look like a country run by Mister Rogers, but Batista played ball so it was an ally. International relations in general are characterized by an amoral state of anarchy, there is no right and wrong, only suzerains and clients.
kmeisthax 5y ago
God, I wish the US could ally itself with modern-day Iran. But yes, it's entirely historical reasons. America used to actually be allied with Iran back when it was a monarchy; and this in particular is a good chunk of the reason why the two countries hate each other. The CIA in particular tried to fuck over the country and it backfired, hard. So Iran decided, instead of allying itself with the first (America) or second (USSR) world, they'd become a theocratic democracy. Once we successfully pissed off Iran; our backup solution was to ally with Saudi Arabia and Israel. Yes, the same Saudi Arabia that had just embargoed the US for being too pro-Israel a few years prior. Geopolitics is weird. (One thing I do want to point out is that you may be measuring the gender equality of an entire country by the gender equality of it's computer programming staff. This is a mistake: those properties are inversely proportional. Iran sends more women computer programmers abroad because it's so gender unequal. In contrast, very gender-equal countries tend to produce fewer women computer programmers. Iran isn't a bastion of feminism, it's just not as bad as it's neighboring countries. In terms of gender equality, Iran is more of an Alabama than a Sweden.)
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  I'd encourage you to read more objective sources about the history of modern Iran rather than ones which chalk it up to "America/CIA bad". Religious fanatics were already taking over the country in the 1920s, long before America had any interest in the region.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    I'm telling this from an American perspective. The Middle East is the poster child of the harms of religious nationalism; but that's not a uniquely Iranian problem. Nor does religious nationalism or fundamentalism uniquely imperil normalizing relations with a country - Saudi Arabia has an arguably stronger movement of fundamentalists and religions nationalists, and we still allied with them. The grandparent asked for "Why does America support Saudi Arabia when Iran is more in line with American values", and in that particular case the answer is almost entirely "CIA Bad", possibly with a dash of "right wingers use other countries' right wingers as an excuse to hate those countries".
amurthy1 5y ago
The Saudis support US oil interest by for example selling their oil only in dollars and buying US weapons which props up our military industrial complex. This is why the US govt likes them and much of what Americans learn about the middle east is heavily influenced by what the govt puts out.
- fmajid 5y ago
  It’s part of an agreement between Nikon and King Faisal. The US commits to protecting the al Saud family (note: not the country, but it’s kleptocracy), in exchange the Saudis commit to holding their money in the US.
elliekelly 5y ago
It seems Iran may have taken a page out of MBS’s kidnapping dissident journalists playbook: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/nyregion/iran-masih-alinejad-kidnapping.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/nyregion/iran-masih-aline...
tsjq 5y ago
Valid point indeed. A big problem point for US with Iran : the latter's issue with Israel.
- nickik 5y ago
  Israel actually supported Iran during Iran-Iraq war. The US at that point was supporting Iraq. It is really only once Iraq was defeated, that Israel turned hard against Iran. Israel is simply always against the biggest potential power in the middle east. Iran has multiple times put these things up for negotiation but the US has systematically refused such attempts.
shadilay 5y ago
Iran is at best a theocracy masquerading as a democracy. The Ayatollah is a dictator for life and approves any 'democratic' candidates. As for why Iran is an enemy it's mostly to do with the hostage crisis, an act of international barbarism. Under the Shah US-Iran relations were actually quite good. The second thing is the idea of destabilizing other countries in the region through exporting the 'islamic revolution'. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/world/middleeast/iran-presidential-election-democracy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/world/middleeast/iran-pre...
bronzeage 5y ago
There's nothing democratic in Iran - they jail political opponents, and they filter political candidates so heavily even an ex-prime-minister couldn't participate in the last elections. They used to be democratic before the Islamic revolution, now it's just fake. Iran had made it their purpose to spread terrorism and fund terrorist organisations in the middle east. Hizbullah, Hamas, the Houthies. There has been progress with Saudi Arabia that meant they don't explicitly attempt to fund Hamas militarily, which leaves Iran as the major funder of terrorism against Israel.

ink_13 5y ago

> they appear to have legit elections You might want to research this point more deeply.

NullPrefix 5y ago
The 'legit elections' or the 'they [...] have' part?
nickik 5y ago
The elections are legit, but you need to be vetted to be allowed to run and the position you gain is not all that powerful.

nemothekid 5y ago

>Citizens of both countries seem to hate America, but ordinary Iranian citizens never did a 911-style attack on the US. Is it because of historical reasons that Saudis are the friend and Iranians the enemy? The real quick spark notes are: Iran tried to socialize their Oil Production as they believed that Irani's deserved more than 10% of the profit generated instead of just paying Britain forever. In response the CIA did a coup d'état and there's been instability ever since. Naturally the US aligned itself with it's own oil company in the region (California-Arabian Standard Oil, which is now the Aramco) given that it had just made an enemy of Iran. I think a pretty weird quirk of history is that if you squint hard enough Aramco is technically a Silicon Valley startup, with beginnings in San Francisco that was one of the largest IPOs of 2020.

oh_sigh 5y ago
Imagine this: In England, the Queen decides to dissolve the parliament - which she has the absolute right to do. Boris says "No, I'm the boss now". The USA sends in some aid for the Queen and helps get Boris out of there, so the Queen can re-set up a new government. Did the Queen/US commit a coup d'etat? Or did Boris commit the coup and try to become a dictator by not stepping down when legally required to? That is exactly what happened in Iran, if you replace "Queen" with "Shah" and "Boris" with "Mossadegh".
- yongjik 5y ago
  I don't know what answer you are expecting, but realistically(?) speaking, the world will absolutely lose their mind if America installs its favorite leader on the UK. That kind of shit is what superpowers do onto countries like Iran or Afghanistan, not in Western Europe.
  - sceadu 5y ago
    That's not the point of his example...
- nemothekid 5y ago
  >The USA sends in some aid for the Queen ... That is exactly what happened in Iran This seem disingenuous as you completely remove the motivations of the actors. You forgot the part where the US bribes the queen to dissolve the parliament so that Boris doesn't nationalize British Petroleum. That's a HUGE detail that you are handwaving away. So yes, if the US bribed the queen to dissolve parliament because the people of UK democratically decided to nationalize BP, that would be a very bad thing even though the queen "has the absolute right to do" so.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > You forgot the part where the US bribes the queen to dissolve the parliament so that Boris doesn't nationalize British Petroleum Also the part where the CIA pays for and stages a coup attempt just so that it can use it as a pretext to use other forces that it is also paying to suppress the armed uprising on behalf of the Queen, with the resulting security situation being the public pretext used for the disillusion of parliament.

emilsedgh 5y ago

> Citizens of both countries seem to hate America Absolutely not. Middle and upper class Iranians absolutely love America. Never been to Saudi but I doubt their people hate America as well. (I agree with the rest of your comment though) Source: Iranian

noaccnt 5y ago
"Middle and upper class Iranians absolutely love America." So, as a generalization for most of the country, his statement is correct. Unless you dismiss the lower classes as disposable riffraff as the Shah did.
- emilsedgh 5y ago
  His statement is not correct. First, a massive portion of the population (middle and upper class) are also considerable and they _dont_ hate America. Second, the working class doesn't hate America. I was born and grown up in Iran and I've never seen _anyone_ actually having strong negative feelings towards the US. I don't think Iranian working class thinks about US as much as Americans are lead to believe.
  - noaccnt 5y ago
    Summary Look, I happen to have a very high opinion of Iranians and Iranian society. I think you are one of the most sophisticated people in the world (though, note, sophisticated and sophism share the same root ;). I think the Ayatollahs have, in many ways, perverted Iranian society (in others ways ensured it's independence). But your statement is too simple, too lacking in nuance. It is, frankly, dangerous (but I'll defend your right to share them with my life!) in the same way that statements about Iraqi's perception of America were 20 years ago. Long Version: "I was born and grown up in Iran " I figured, but I didn't want to bring it up; if you're going to talk about "lived experiences" then it's fair that I ask you what your social class you belong to in Iran. Were you the son/daughter of an engineer? Or were you the child of a manual laborer? Did you grow up in Tehran, or Shiraz? Or did you grow up in a small village in the middle of nowhere? Did you have foreign DVDs when you grew up? More succinctly, did your class make or was it depicted in "Children of Heaven"? (deserved the Oscar, btw. It was brilliant) "First, a massive portion of the population (middle and upper class) are also considerable" Well, doesn't that implies that the Ayatollahs did well by Iran? In the times of the Shah the middle class was proportionally small, certainly not large enough to make OP's comment wrong. (The answer is no, the Ayatollahs were a disaster and Iran's middle class, even if it numbers in the millions, is still a small fraction of the total population) " and they _dont_ hate America." OK, here I'll concede you're probably partially right but only because "America" is very ill defined. How can someone "hate" Akron OH? You can despise them, but hate? Ohioans are the nicest people I've met in the world (lived experience from growing up in four continents)! But, typically, when ppl talk about hating "America" they are referring to DC and DC's policies.

mullingitover 5y ago

Yep, no matter how monstrous your human rights record is, no matter how big of a kleptocracy your government is, the US will be your ally as long as you give the US suzerain authority and play ball with US corporations. There's no end to the human rights abuses the US will overlook if you're willing to play ball. Iran is in the doghouse because they nationalized their oil, same as Venezuela. Cuba under the US-backed Batista dictatorship makes the current communist regime there look like a country run by Mister Rogers, but Batista played ball so it was an ally. International relations in general are characterized by an amoral state of anarchy, there is no right and wrong, only suzerains and clients.

kmeisthax 5y ago

God, I wish the US could ally itself with modern-day Iran. But yes, it's entirely historical reasons. America used to actually be allied with Iran back when it was a monarchy; and this in particular is a good chunk of the reason why the two countries hate each other. The CIA in particular tried to fuck over the country and it backfired, hard. So Iran decided, instead of allying itself with the first (America) or second (USSR) world, they'd become a theocratic democracy. Once we successfully pissed off Iran; our backup solution was to ally with Saudi Arabia and Israel. Yes, the same Saudi Arabia that had just embargoed the US for being too pro-Israel a few years prior. Geopolitics is weird. (One thing I do want to point out is that you may be measuring the gender equality of an entire country by the gender equality of it's computer programming staff. This is a mistake: those properties are inversely proportional. Iran sends more women computer programmers abroad because it's so gender unequal. In contrast, very gender-equal countries tend to produce fewer women computer programmers. Iran isn't a bastion of feminism, it's just not as bad as it's neighboring countries. In terms of gender equality, Iran is more of an Alabama than a Sweden.)

oh_sigh 5y ago
I'd encourage you to read more objective sources about the history of modern Iran rather than ones which chalk it up to "America/CIA bad". Religious fanatics were already taking over the country in the 1920s, long before America had any interest in the region.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  I'm telling this from an American perspective. The Middle East is the poster child of the harms of religious nationalism; but that's not a uniquely Iranian problem. Nor does religious nationalism or fundamentalism uniquely imperil normalizing relations with a country - Saudi Arabia has an arguably stronger movement of fundamentalists and religions nationalists, and we still allied with them. The grandparent asked for "Why does America support Saudi Arabia when Iran is more in line with American values", and in that particular case the answer is almost entirely "CIA Bad", possibly with a dash of "right wingers use other countries' right wingers as an excuse to hate those countries".

amurthy1 5y ago

The Saudis support US oil interest by for example selling their oil only in dollars and buying US weapons which props up our military industrial complex. This is why the US govt likes them and much of what Americans learn about the middle east is heavily influenced by what the govt puts out.

fmajid 5y ago
It’s part of an agreement between Nikon and King Faisal. The US commits to protecting the al Saud family (note: not the country, but it’s kleptocracy), in exchange the Saudis commit to holding their money in the US.

elliekelly 5y ago

It seems Iran may have taken a page out of MBS’s kidnapping dissident journalists playbook: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/nyregion/iran-masih-alinejad-kidnapping.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/nyregion/iran-masih-aline...

tsjq 5y ago

Valid point indeed. A big problem point for US with Iran : the latter's issue with Israel.

nickik 5y ago
Israel actually supported Iran during Iran-Iraq war. The US at that point was supporting Iraq. It is really only once Iraq was defeated, that Israel turned hard against Iran. Israel is simply always against the biggest potential power in the middle east. Iran has multiple times put these things up for negotiation but the US has systematically refused such attempts.

shadilay 5y ago

Iran is at best a theocracy masquerading as a democracy. The Ayatollah is a dictator for life and approves any 'democratic' candidates. As for why Iran is an enemy it's mostly to do with the hostage crisis, an act of international barbarism. Under the Shah US-Iran relations were actually quite good. The second thing is the idea of destabilizing other countries in the region through exporting the 'islamic revolution'. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/world/middleeast/iran-presidential-election-democracy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/world/middleeast/iran-pre...

bronzeage 5y ago

There's nothing democratic in Iran - they jail political opponents, and they filter political candidates so heavily even an ex-prime-minister couldn't participate in the last elections. They used to be democratic before the Islamic revolution, now it's just fake. Iran had made it their purpose to spread terrorism and fund terrorist organisations in the middle east. Hizbullah, Hamas, the Houthies. There has been progress with Saudi Arabia that meant they don't explicitly attempt to fund Hamas militarily, which leaves Iran as the major funder of terrorism against Israel.