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There's no doubt what's happening in Iran is a massacre by a dictatorial regime, but good grief the parallels between the rhetoric now and that of 2003 are impo
by bink 8mo ago
There's no doubt what's happening in Iran is a massacre by a dictatorial regime, but good grief the parallels between the rhetoric now and that of 2003 are impossible to ignore. I thought we had moved past the idea that the US could just bomb a country into a better future.
- mgraczyk 8mo agoBut unfortunately it does sometimes work, for example in Yugoslavia. And it would have worked in Iraq if we hadn't dismantled the entire civilian infrastructure.
- throawayonthe 8mo agowhat on earth could you mean by it working in yugoslavia
- blululu 8mo agoThe killing in Bosnia and Kosovo were stopped by Bill Clinton. The bombings were what brought all sides to the table to broker the Dayton agreement. The siege of Sarajevo ended. The peace has held for nearly 30 years now.
- krzyk 8mo agoOK, but this was more like Serbia/Kosovo/Bosnia. Maybe GP was asking about previous Yugoslavia war, where AFAIR there was no intervention and massacres continued for quite long.
- tptacek 8mo agoSeems clear they were talking about NATO intervention in 1999 and the ouster of Milosevic. Also notable as a military intervention that was at the time widely seen as a "Wag The Dog" scenario.
- tptacek 8mo agoI don't recall that being any part of the rationale for the US war in Iraq (which, to be clear, will hopefully go down as the least just war the US ever instigated). "We'll be greeted as liberators" was trotted out as a mitigation for how bad occupations normally are, but we were going whether or not that was true. The Iraq war was not a war of liberation against an unjust government. It was a war of choice against a country that happened to have a horrendously unjust government. The pretext for the Iraq war was that they were involved in 9/11 and possessed weapons of mass destruction.
- dTal 8mo agoIt absolutely was a large part of the general snowstorm of rationales offered. "Regime change" they called it, remember? This Guardian article[0] is a wonderful little window into the zeitgeist of the time. You can see that many commentators explicitly cite the "brutal dictator" rationale, notably Salman Rushdie. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/jan/19/foreignpolicy.iraq https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/jan/19/foreignpoli...
- tptacek 8mo agoLots of people on both ends of the political spectrum supported it at the time, because Baathism truly was nightmarish, and because almost everyone disastrously overestimated the competence of American war leadership. But, whatever the rationale amongst the rest of the "Coalition of the Willing" might have been, the core claim of the war's instigators in the US was WMD. Regime change was a mechanism for decisively eliminating terrorist threats.
- Analemma_ 8mo agoThe "politician's fallacy" (we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this) is at its strongest when it comes to massacres in other countries. Nobody wants to sit around and just watch it continue, and it's really hard to put yourself in the frame to accurately analyze "is there actually anything I can do about this which won't make the problem worse?" It's a hard problem and I don't know what to do about it, especially since (as a sibling comment mentions), sometimes you can improve the situation. Other times you will make it much worse. And I haven't seen a trustworthy way to distinguish the two (lots of interventionist-minded folks claim they have one; I think they're kidding themselves).
- jopsen 8mo agoThe something in question is bombing. Didn't Israel and the US try that last year? Maybe the objective wasn't regime, but I doubt more bombs will do that? Not after so many years of sanctions. Sadly, I don't see any positive outcome, short of the regime gracefully collapsing on itself. Hardening sanctions won't do Iranians any good, but it will make the country poorer and less able to inflict violence on other countries. Which is guess is the logic. And following the export of drones to Russia, I doubt Europe, which has previously been in favor of fewer sanctions, will oppose more sanctions on Iran. If only the US administration had friends, they could do something with sanctions. But I guess useless bombing it is, or maybe just nothing -- this is Trump after all. Sadly, I doubt it matters either way. The regime sponsors terrorism, not reason they wouldn't do it at home.
- aaronbrethorst 8mo agoWhether or not we have, this probably has more to do with bombing the huge, late night Friday Epstein files dump off the front page.
- docdeek 8mo agoThey've been moving ships and positioning assets for more than a week now. Not everything is related to a document dump.
- tptacek 8mo agoWhat does? This post?
- jfengel 8mo agoThere's nothing left in the files, so there's no need to overwhelm it. If there were anything incriminating, it would outlast the weekend news cycle and displace anything short of an attack on American soil. But anything incriminating has been redacted, so it might as well be the weekend news cycle.
- Drupon 8mo agoThis insipid "it's all a distraction about the Epstein files" cliche is so nonsensical. We're talking about massacres here. The weak ass Epstein file "releases" are more likely to themselves be the distraction.
- cosmicgadget 8mo agoThe administration is trying to distract attention from Iran's brutal protestor crackdown with material implicating the president, FED chair nominee, former DOGE head, FLOTUS biopic director, ... K
- Drupon 8mo agoIt doesn't matter. If no one prosecutes them (not gonna happen), then it's really not gonna have much impact other than possibly giving Dems more wins in Nov, assuming we're even able to have free fair elections then.
- jopsen 8mo agoI doubt there will be a ground invasion this time. The current US administration cannot build a coalition (and logistics without a coalition is hard), not will the US public go for it. And is there really much you can do from the air that wasn't done already? Either the Iranians do it themselves or it doesn't happen. Sadly, I don't see any good outcomes for the protestors. But you never know, oppressive regimes appear stable, until they are not.
- bink 8mo agoThere definitely won't be boots on the ground and that's kinda the point. Even if we had boots on the ground there's no guarantee that the US getting involved will make things better for the people of the region. We couldn't deliver democracy for Afghanistan after two decades but there are still people who think we'll be greeted as liberators in Iran and we'll be able to claim "mission accomplished" after a few months.
- tptacek 8mo agoI don't think there'll be boots on the ground either but Iran isn't Afghanistan or Iraq, both of which were essentially failed states with minimal state capacity riven with internal armed conflict and ethnic tension. There's ethnic tension everywhere, including in Iran, but Iran has at its core an extraordinarily functional and coherent society.
- linhns 8mo ago> Either the Iranians do it themselves or it doesn't happen. Second this. And it's unlikely to succeed this time as Iranian people sadly do not really want to right now.
- cosmicgadget 8mo agoCertainly not but if the regime is forced to flee to Russia it gives the people a better chance.