Iran has a far better chance of emerging as a functioning democracy than well any other country in the region.
Iran have had a consecutive culture for at least two thousand years. Iraq by comparison was part of the Ottoman empire for centuries.

Biden will be damned if he does damned if he doesn't.

If Biden does little or nothing people will say he is weak.
If he does respond people will say he is dragging America into another war.

I think 100% they will respond. Either against Iranian proxies or against something more directly Iranian, perhaps in the Persian gulf.

Perhaps but also not really. Iran has double Iraqs population, a much larger arms industry and well trained, experienced and motivated soldiers.
Would they be defeated? Probably. But it doesn't make sense for the US to ever put boots on the ground.

There were public uprisings against Iran's mullah regime on multiple occasions in recent years, the regime was barely able to crush them. I wouldn't say the mullah regime is hanging by a thread right now, but there's a sizable part of the Iranian people who want a different, more liberal and democratic country. Maybe not in the "guys in BDSM attire gyrating in front of toddlers on Christopher Street Day"-liberal, but in the "women can show their hair and one male witness is no longer worth as much as two female witnesses"-kind of liberal.

And like Proximity already alluded to, Iran is an ancient civilization with a strong sense of national identity and high culture. Before the CIA fucked it all up, Iran was one of the most secular and liberal countries in the Middle East. In any case, you cannot compare Iran with countries like Afghanistan or Syria, where a couple of primitive tribes without culture or unifying identity were gathered under the tent of a wholly artificial state. Or places like Iraq and Syria where a dictator with an iron fist had prevented the country from being torn apart by sectarian conflict for decades.

Of all the countries in the Middle East, Iran is the one which imho has the highest likelihood of developing into a self-sustaining and somewhat stable democracy. That being said, I have complete and total faith in the US fucking things up yet again in the case of a hypothetical invasion. Either by driving the common people toward the mullahs as the war goes on, or by promoting the wrong people after toppling the mullahs: corrupt pieces of shit who are bad for the development of the country, but willing to sell the country's oil to the American overlords.

Long story short: I'm 100% against an invasion of Iran, but Iran is a place for which I still have plenty of hope.

Let's say Israel/usa has had enough of irgc proxies shelling their outposts. What do they do?

Invading Iran with boots on the ground has been off the table for over 20 years. When we invaded Iraq we had the luxury of staging the troops on the border, while getting SEAD and air superiority. Can't do that with iran (see picrel)

Iran just launched three military satellites 4 days ago for exactly this purpose. It has been developing its ballistic missle technology (even under heavy sanctions) and is only second to the US in terms of capability. It has tens of thousands of mrbms buried beneath its mountains which cannot be detected for a pre emptive strike.

Iran's entire strategy was to ditch making expensive legacy boomer tier hard assets and instead spend everything on missle technology (doctrine from the war of the cities vs iraq). This seems to be paying off dividends.

America/israels strategy has always been one to target key iranian infrastructure (oil/desalination plants/etc) with f35s, as to avoid detection. The problem of course is that then iran/Iranian proxies start launching everything at Israel and overwhelm its aa systems but that's basically how "attacking iran" plays out.


This post was edited by zorzin on Jan 29 2024 07:42am

And what's to say Iran isn't already a self-sustaining and somewhat stable democracy? What's the metric we're supposed to judge that by, their adherence to our value system? Any direct intervention would of course leave them in shambles at best like every other country we exported democracy to 500 lbs at a time. But here they are competing on a global stage with world powers, developing as a nuclear state, competing with oil barons backed by the biggest world powers unlike their more indirect pseudoalliance with Russia and China. They're expanding their influence and gaining ground opportunistically as America abandons it. So what's our endgame, what's our goal? If we can't tolerate a sovereign adversary and their reciprocal escalation, are we required to crush all enemies and subjugate the entire world under our heel? Because we can't just fuck up their shit enough to topple them and leave again, there's no scenario where that works out in our favor

You are horribly mistaken if you believe that. In 2003, Iraq's population stood at 24m, Iran currently has 87m people. Iran has 4 times the land area of Iraq. And a much more rugged geography. In Iraq, you had to take 1 city (Basra), drive along one flat highway to the other major city (Baghdad), and then the third major city (Mossul) was happily surrendering because the Kurds living there hated Saddam anyway. After that, you had to drive along flat roads through the open and flat desert to a couple smaller cities and that was it. The US troops only needed to conquer one relatively narrow stripe of land along the river valleys, the deserts could be ignored and there were no geographic obstacles in the way.

Iran with its mountainous and rugged geography lends itself to partisan warfare, ambushes and so on. Maintaining logistics chains would also be a lot more difficult since you'd have to go much further inland.
And last but not least, Iran has a well-armed, well-trained and well-motivated military while Iraq's army was a paper tiger with bad morale.


Here you have a map showing Iran's and Iraq's geography:


This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 29 2024 07:55am

Iran is not a true democracy and you know it. First, because all the true power is vested in the Supreme Leader who is not democratically elected. (If a new Supreme Leader must be chosen, he is selected by a group of electors called "Assembly of Experts" which are chosen by the Guardian Council, and the members of the Guardian Council were in turn selected by the previous Supreme Leader. Go figure...)

Second, because strong candidates from the opposition are routinely barred from running for Prime Minister (and other, smaller offices) by the Guardian Council, so that even the relatively powerless office of PM can only ever go to conformist candidates and any kind of true opposition to the mullah regime is nipped in the bud.





The idea was to isolate Iran and to pit them against Saudi Arabia, their major geostrategic rival in the Gulf region. Due to the Sunni/Shia conflict, there was a natural fault line between the two which we only needed to foster and amplify. Trump did strengthen ties with the Saudis and cut off the Iranians from major funding. Obama and Biden did the opposite, sent billions to Iran (which used the financial breathing room to fund its proxy wars across the region) and pissed off the Saudis (who in turn normalized relations with Iran and also reduced their campaign against the Houthis in Yemen). And we all know that if they could get away with it, Obama and Biden would also love to withdraw US support for Israel...

Well, the damage is done, so I honestly have no idea what a good way forward would look like. The only positive development in recent weeks was the Chinese telling the Iranians to rein in their proxies because attacks on global shipping routes hurt the Chinese economy just as much as the European one. Other than that, the idea seems to be that the transition away from fossils will eventually reduce fossil consumption in North America and Europe... not to zero, but to the point that domestic production in NATO countries becomes self-sufficient. Once we no longer rely on imports from the Middle East, we no longer have to care about that region and can leave it alone.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 29 2024 08:20am

And again what's the metric? Are we to talk about true self-determination when our party in power is trying to bar the main opposition from running for office? When the EU forces its will upon countries like Hungary?
Nobody has a true democracy and that's a good thing, tyranny of the majority and all. And as far as Iran's dual system goes, does it or doesn't it wind up representing the will of the people in a civil and bureaucratic manner? Its not like the anti-government protesters make up a majority of the citizenry being oppressed under the mullah's boot, nor would they instantly morph into some pro-western republic that loves the american way of life overnight if we 'liberated' them. Iran has plenty of regressive tendencies and we can judge them as lesser than our own freedoms, but they're not even a theocratic monarch like the Saudis, they're far closer to our structure already, and we're not necessarily paragons of liberty these days.




Yeah the whole idea of trying to play the Iranians and KSA against each other definitely hasn't worked, and Obama's Iran Deal swirled around the bowl and flushed its way down with counterproductive effect.
The question has to be what the endgame is. Iran will be a nuclear state whether or not they're still empowered by oil sales. Does the world look better if they are destabilized by invasion or destabilized by economic collapse in some miraculous post-oil world?
There's plenty to be gained by ratcheting down the hostilities and seeking peaceful coexistence and hooking Iran back into the global economy, same as should be done with Russia and North Korea. Neoliberals are so indignant at the prospect of a peaceful world they'd purposefully build up a pressure bomb out of a nuclear state and leave it to future generations to explode. If Trump takes a second term and flies to Tehran like Nixon in China we'll know the mideast actually has a chance, and maybe they won't even lop his head off

There are still independent courts and a free press standing in the way, things you don't have in Iran. And as far as I know, the Guardian Council in Iran will bar all non-conformist candidates with any kind of name recognition. And again: in the US, the vast majority of power is subject to elections while all the true power in Iran isn't.

Sure, no real country will ever score a 100/100 on the theoretical democracy-scale, but the US, for all its flaws, still scores magnitudes higher than Iran or Russia. Your propensity for defending authoritarian regimes and dictatorships is irritating.


Who knows, Iran hasn't had free and fair elections in 45 years, nor is there free opinion polling. What we do know is that there is civil unrest every couple of years which the regime quells with naked violence. The will of the more liberal- and secular-minded parts of Iran's population has barely any democratic representation, the regime only ever makes as few concessions (how much hair may be shown in public etc) as necessary to prevent their anger from boiling over.

All of that is fundamentally different from the liberal democracies of the West, where there are institutionalized minority rights, the political opposition gets its fair share of power and governments can be voted out of office.





A world in which Putin, Xi and the Mullahs are given free reign will not be a peaceful world. Nor will the world of the neocons in which the US desperately tries to maintain global hegemony by waging wars around the globe. The neocon path being wrong doesn't imply that the correct way forward is to go in the diametrically opposed direction and roll over to every dictator.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 29 2024 10:58am

irans military is no joke, even IF the states still had the strength to pull this off, the american public would have to accept tens of thousands of casualties

there is more to war than just a lot of equipment and 800 billion per year in spendings