The protests today in Iran due to the death of a young woman while in custody for allegedly violating the dress code (which her family disputes) are, let’s be honest, probably not going to lead to the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.
But I do wonder… if the US hadn’t been fucking with this poor, benighted country since they dared to do their own thing in 1979, might they have, by now… I dunno. Gotten sick of the Ayatollahs’ shit and moderated or completely replaced their repressive regime? Instead, there’s a compelling argument for their government to make that amounts to “you need to shut the fuck up because we’re the world’s sole hyperpower’s Enemy #1 and if we lighten up even a little bit, they’re going to try take advantage of that and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?”.
I genuinely wish any American president since Carter had the balls to just decided “we’re going to engage with Iran like we do any other country we’re not actively at war with and stop the sanctions and lighten the fuck up annnnnnd… see what happens”. Sure, maybe they’d race to a nuke by 1995 and bye-bye Tel Aviv but… I doubt it?
Feh. Nothing super-deep here but I do wish America’s default reaction to seemingly negative-to-American-interests events overseas was more “wait and see” then “we gotta fuck these dudes up, immediately and totally”.
Or even that, if we must try the latter, that, when it DOESN’T FUCKING WORK FOR FORTY PLUS FUCKING YEARS, that maybe we’d have the courage to try something else, even if that’s just “welp, we lost this one, let’s reset the relationship to baseline and see what happens”.
We’re, for a few more years at least, the wealthiest, strongest country in the history of countries. Sure wish we acted like it once in a while.
shawn ritchie dot com 