It is simply dumb. The CIA certainly didn't want Khomeini in power, but him being elected is certainly a direct consequence of the CIA toppling their democracy.
IMHO this rhetoric muddies waters and to an extent absolves polititians of governance failures. It isn't clear if an issue is because of am alleged CIA sponsored coup or due to corruption and incompetence. Either way you likely to have very vocal and passionate people supporting both positions.
Yes, West African CFA is pegged to Euro, now. Earlier, it was pegged to French francs. One disadvantage: countries don't have economic freedom/flexibility to finance public debt. If a country issues its own currency (not pegged to any Western currency), it has flexibility to issue/print money to finance public projects the way the Federal reserve in the USA is doing right now, by buying corporate bonds and treasury notes, etc. The flexibility that the US Federal reserve, the ECB, the Bank of Japan have, can't be exported to African central banks by the mere fact of having own currency; there should be demand for such currency. Today, every Chinese, every African, every Indian, every Latin American (almost 75% of the world population) wants to hold assets in USD, EUR, etc, but not in Kwachas (Zambian currency), not in Turkish Lira.
If a currency is not hard pegged, if a currency is issued by a local sovereign central bank, then you can see run away inflation as you can witness in many African countries. This inflation is also bad, and that forces moneyed-locals to keep foreign currencies instead of local currency.
The solution: good governance with local currency, not hard pegged to any Western currency. Without good governance, local currency will lead to bad outcomes.
What if there's some good reasons deep underneath the surface of what happened in so many countries but because of political correctness the researches of the reasons are impossible to start so the real solutions if exists are not available in near future?
Once the independence movement is over, once the generation that got the independent dies out, don't expect any cooperation, devolving into "vote for me because the opposition party sucks".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Charter_of_1291#/media...
(Note the seals, like for a papal bull, dangling from the document to make it official. When I first heard about "truck nuts", I was reminded of these documents.)
Switzerland is a small country. An 'anomaly' to Arrow's theorem, if one insists on it. So, one has to study Switzerland's democracy.
on edit: instead of repeating the same thing in each response berating me for not accepting that it was a consequence I will put the additional response here
I didn't say it wasn't a consequence, but a direct consequence is generally understood as "an effect that is an immediate result of an event, incident, or occurrence."
https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Direct_consequence
https://www.iadclexicon.org/direct-consequence/
although it is often used for rhetorical effect in cases where the consequence is obviously not direct, I just avoid the usage unless I believe it is direct.
Would you easily forgive a country that installed a Shah by toppling the democratically elected leader to get access to oil? Would you forget if you live day by day under a government directly installed by foreign actors? I don't think so, so I think it is a very safe bet in this case.
Of course it is all a consequence of these actions but we pretend we don’t see it.
Could Athabasca and Green River provide a way for the US to stop riding the tiger above? (I would find this hypothesis more probable only after having seen more export capacity in the Gulf.)
suggests a pretty direct line between the perception of the Shah as foreign influenced and Khomeini as the local boy.
(Being a westerner, the aims of the White Revolution looked pretty good to me. With hindsight, a Red Iran, like a Red Afghanistan, may have turned out to be a much less prickly neighbour in the twenty-first century. To this day Iran and the US do not have diplomatic relations, requiring others to serve as go-betweens. They would be geopolitical "seconds" if this were not a world that now frowns upon duelling.)
The Anglo-American legal tradition has two notions of causation: "but-for" and "proximate". The latter asks whether a consequence was foreseeable, and in practice amounts to a judgement about moral culpability for the consequence.
The establishment of an autocratic state was a foreseeable consequence of CIA intervention, and it doesn't seem fair to fault Iranians for failing to subdue their autocrats in a single generation. Such things take time.
The semantics are far less important here than the principle. What's an appropriate "immediate" term after which one can wash their hands of triggering a long chain of unfortunate events? Where does the first link end? A year? Five? Ten? 24?
If you ignore long term effects many actions seem completely harmless. A fire can be started with a few sparks, an avalanche with a few snowflakes. Lighting a fire won't make you responsible just for the "direct consequences" of a flame appearing but for all the consequences. Throwing a punch won't make you responsible just for the direct consequence of pain to the jaw but also for the person dying in the subsequent fall.
And you may argue that a fire has no "choice" but to burn, while humans have self determination. But we already know that an individual might act unpredictably but a whole population is quite predictable.
Those actions were intended to cause exactly the harm that they did, as predicted. And they should be judges as such.
"Conclusive evidence", whether for Iraq or China, leads to a U.S. official dangling a vial of dried bat semen in front of the UN Security Council.
It's exacerbated with reactions to events. The most recent of which is the "bounty" issue. Officials and journalists are outraged that Russian intelligence services allegedly gave money to Taliban to target U.S. troops. Anyone with half a brain would think: isn't this the same thing the CIA did by training Taliban on U.S. soil, with Special Forces, giving them RPGs, weapons and money to kill Soviet troops? I mean, the US/Taliban/Russia is almost a Vicky Cristina Barcelona triangle.
The mere fact of these former intelligence officers and government officials being outraged is insulting.
More on relations:
Notice how Putin's speeches and interview differ from the usual U.S. diplomats and officials. U.S. officials and diplomats' speeches would piss off anyone with a functioning brain, it is the usual silly patriotism with wavy flags, exporting freedom and democracy, stars and stripes, and demagogy. No one can get away with that because the counter-examples are too many. This is bad salesmanship.
In contrast, Putin takes the approach to explain the lay of the land, underplays his role, and takes the position of the underdog: "my job is to look for the Russian people, we're not as powerful as the U.S., look at what they did with all that power", and when people look, they agree. It's a very effective selling/recruiting strategy.
The big difference is that the Iraq/Libya cases were partially intended to do good things which could get some support from certain voters. That's worse than CIA coups with strategical goals but turned out to have unintended consequences which will be correctly evaluated later to avoid the future mistakes.
The actions with good intentions however are more deceptive because good intentions are often disguised self spiritual satisfactions so the real ground facts were less checked correctly. That's an theory that after tens of thousands deaths of Iraq war , the bombing of Libya could happen AGAIN with little objections because voters are fine with good intention of overthrowing evils, and with values (i.e. quasi religion) people are not likely to measure the magnitude of consequences.
In terms of disaster, next version of Hitler is a human rights promoter.(Tony Blair?) Good intention is a way to circumvent "fool me once/twice" alert because politicians cheated in a such a good way not only themselves are cheated to enhance the deception but talking is so spiritually attractive that even non-religious people don't think about the history of ground truth associated with those beautiful words.
> " The West is in danger. It makes no difference whether or not their governments and intellectuals realize it or not.
> The German people, in any event, is unwilling to bow to this danger. Behind the oncoming Soviet divisions we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them terror, the specter of mass starvation and complete anarchy. ... Two thousand years of Western civilization are in danger. ... We could see our venerable part of the world collapse, and bury in its ruins the ancient inheritance of the West. That is the danger we face today.
> My second thesis: Only the German Reich and its allies are in the position to resist this danger. ... Bolshevism set ideological as well as military boundaries, which poses a danger to every nation. The world no longer has the choice between falling back into its old fragmentation or accepting a new order for Europe under Axis leadership. The only choice now is between living under Axis protection or in a Bolshevist Europe."
https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb36...
Even if that’s true on some scientific level, human institutions, human social practice, and the human mind itself, all rely on the idea of agency and responsibility. If you’re going to talk about whose “fault” it is, then you need to speak in those terms, not the mere chains of causation that science can talk about.
No one claims that present wasn’t caused by the past. The question is who bears moral responsibility today for a regime that Iranians placed in power, that Iranians (a large enough chunk at least) continue to support, etc. Iranians are not uniquely automatons. They own their regime at least as much as anyone else, especially at this point. That US actions set a chain of events in motion does not absolve Iranians of everything they decided to do since.
You are confusing causation and fault/responsibility. The US interventions, the Shah’s personal decisions, the ayatollahs’ decisions, the rise of Islam, the Persian Empire, the first humans who left Africa, are all causes of the current situation. But to determine who is at fault, who is responsible, is a very different question. Proximity in time is only a vague heuristic.
It’s common in every day parlance to mix these concepts up. Legal systems have been confused about the distinction for thousands of years. But the distinction is very important to speaking sensibly about things.
It's sort of trivially true that responsibility for every facet of the Islamic Revolution in Iran can't be laid directly at the feet of the U.S. But, when you screw around with another country explicitly to steal their resources and exploit their people, it's silly to expect whatever violent resistance springs up to be rational and measured in every respect. They may even find it useful to heighten certain differences with the colonizing power to gain support from the people.
But we rightly lay the blame squarely at the feet of the Nazis and their supporters.
Incidentally, in 1953 when the CIA carried out its coup in Iran it was basically run and controlled by people who had made a great deal of money financing the Nazi war effort and then imported a bunch of Nazi war criminals to work for Western intelligence and the space program.
There have also been some books written specifically about Sullivan & Cromwell, which was the investment banking firm where the Dulles Brothers worked and established financial ties to the Nazis, but I haven't read any of them.
In many parts of the world, 200 km is a long way. In the US, 200 years[2] is a long time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great
[2] When I visited עיר דוד/وادي حلوه one of the notable features was its easily defensible water supply. That's an area which has had over 6'000 years of history, with the architecture suggesting very little of it was peaceful.
As a nation we aren't learning any lesson from history, instead we're letting ourselves be manipulated by psychopathic politicians and regurgitate back what they program us with.
What will happen in the future in that middle east region is also a consequence of the same us policy (nothing has really changed) the US continue to have in the area: hunger for oil at any cost whatsoever.
Let's not blame the Romans for they don't exist anymore. The US exists and should have some accountability, at least to us the citizens. You're either blind or choose to not see, whichever you prefer.