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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

I would hesitate to call anything concerning human actions a direct consequence if there is 25 years between the cause and its result.

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.

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Well, they toppled the democratically elected leader and installed the last Shah who was more open to let western powers access their oil. The revolutionary forces 25 years later directly stated they felt justified to get rid of the Shah because of foreign intervention.

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.

> "an effect that is an immediate result of an event, incident, or occurrence."

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.

Why? Did anything change? Did the US hunger for oil and ‘exporting democracy’ mitigate in any sense?

Of course it is all a consequence of these actions but we pretend we don’t see it.

The Catch-22: can't chaperon the oil without the navy, can't cruise the navy without the oil.

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.)

Social sciences and causality --- the inevitable linking of some event and an outcome --- fare poorly. Directly related to the outcome of the UK-US sponsored Mossadegh coup might be a better framing.

I'm on board with your logic, but disagree with your conclusion.

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.

I didn't fault them for not having a revolution expediently, I just think that with a 25 year divide there are thousands of ways things might have played out, there might have been a later revolution, another type of revolution (for example a friend of mine was a communist during the Iranian revolution and for a short time it looked like his side was in good position, but then Khomeini), not taking hostages etc. etc. therefore the revolution that came to pass was not a direct consequence, even if it was directly related.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution#Rise_and_ex...

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.)

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