It's a little bit sickening that so many of these initial comments are joking about the US going to war over the lithium.
Of course it’s hard to say what course history would have taken without this but I fail to see how the current theocracy / securocracy could have had a foothold without it (revolutions always just swap elites).
How long will people continue to pretend the entire modern history of Iran is the deterministic result of Western actions? That in the Shah and even in the Revolution, Iran possesses no agency of its own, a passive object only of Western force?
But to the point: there is absolutely zero chance of the US going to war to secure lithium reserves. And that is leaving aside, in the first place, the fact we are on the cusp of a Li->Na transition. It is the laziest kind of armchair commentary, pattern matching ("foreign country", "resource", "America liberate") with zero grounding in reality.
I believe generally several characteristics of the Shah's regime are held to have laid ground for the revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution#Background_...
So it's not about robbing Iranians of agency (who are among the most distinguished and ancient cultures), just stating that 1953 meddling gave rise to a regime that possessed these characteristics, and without the coup, different dynamics would have been at play.
I totally agree, there is zero chance of war over lithium.
there's nothing strange about a country going to war over a resource. Has been happening for a long time in history, and there's no reason that anything in the modern world changed human nature.
Except that lithium isn't valuable enough to go to war over at the moment.
Now, the threat of being able to develop and fire nukes, on the other hand, is something that might be war-worthy.
That doesn't make it any less sickening. War is always a travesty.
America's postwar boom years resulted in a hegemon that largely avoided conflict. Now that power is more widely distributed amongst peer competitors, we're going to see the resource hungry animals we evolved as come to the forefront. There will be a great deal of contention, and some of it will be heated.
If I had to bet, we'll see more war this century than in the last. Ukraine is just a harbinger of what's to come.
We've already had news cycles normalizing the debate over tactical nukes on the battlefield.
I'm sorry but this ignores the history. Vast swathes of Africa, Latin America and Asia were in conflicts and turmoil, sometimes due to the same hegemon and her allies. The only region that was mostly conflict free in the post WW2 era was Europe and North America.
By contrast about 3% of all humans alive were killed in WW2, over 6 years. 3% doesn't sound too bad, so let's contextualize that. In the United States alone that would be more than 10 million people. That's about 4,620 people killed every single day for 6 years. The amount of suffering that actual war brings is something almost none of us living today in the West can even begin to imagine. I mean can you imagine multiple 9/11 scale events, every single day, for almost 2200 days?
Being honest, I actually had to double check my math because my god that's just an unimaginably vast amount of suffering and death. And WW3 will almost certainly be vastly worse because the first bloc to start losing is going to go nuclear - which will result in a comparable response from the other bloc. This whole hegemony thing has really got to end, or we as a species are going to end.
I didn’t read that in their comment, and since I’m not American I assumed that they are talking about the world. Everyone knows USA is a hegemon in a global sense and not a regional sense. The past 70 years were not some conflict free utopia for rest of the world.
But I agree with your general point that we need to avoid further conflicts else we’re doomed.
Fixed that for you
No it isn't. The US helped plenty of bad regimens get their hands on nuclear weapons and did nothing to prevent it. In fact, if its about nukes, then maybe Israel is the clear problem. They are non signatory to the NPT and almost certainty have secret nukes (likely developed partly with stolen data from the US). So if a 'thread of war' is appropriate, Israel should be the target, not Iran.
Iran on the other hand is a signatory to the NPT, they also have never attempted to develop nuclear weapons. Their program was always monitored under the NPT. A bunch of fake evidence for nuclear weapons was 'discovered' on a laptop in Egypt by Mossad. This evidence was widely reject by literally everybody outside of the Mossad, including the CIA. The whole global intelligence community agree, Iran wasn't developing nuclear weapons.
That didn't stop Israel right-wing to try to use it to get the US to attack Iran for them over it. According to them, Iran is 'one year away from nukes' literally since 1990 so this was just the latest in a long series of such claims.
Iran was not even developing its own enrichment, they had a deal with France to handle the fuel production and France would be responsible for monitoring and taking the nuclear waste back to France. This deal was then killed by the US (Bush) who basically threatened sanction on France. Only in response to that did Iran set up enrichment facilities.
This was then used around 2008-2010 to start a panic about Iran nuclear weapons in a blatant attempt to repeat the Iraq war against Iran. All the right wing think-thanks (with lots of money from Israel, Ratheon and Loockeed and friends) were busy publishing mostly fake nonsense base on manufactured evidence to push the narrative. Thankfully everybody was sick of that shit because of Iraq.
This lead to Obama years of extreme pressure and results in Iran implementing a monitoring regime specially developed just for Iran just they could prove that they were not developing nuclear weapons. Of course all that didn't stop Trump from instantly leaving the deal.
War with Iran is literally an insane concept. Like delusional level of insanity. Even if they developed nuclear weapons, it would be insane to go to war over them. Its a nation with 90 million people, horrible geography and the ability to blockade the most important oil export route in the world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_in_the_United...
The hardest part of my job is connecting Iraq to 9/11 - Bush
Millions of Americans protested the Iraq war[0]. Globally it resulted in the largest protests in the world at that time. It didn't matter.
Of course you're correct about the zeitgeist of the US at the time, the government, the media and the American right were pro-war and they controlled the narrative. And I have to concede in hindsight there have been times where popular collective action has been effective, just never against starting a war AFAIK. When the US decides it wants a war it seems like there's really nothing anyone can do about it.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
These are reddit quality comments that don't belong here.
It's called history