70 years ago, an Anglo-US coup condemned Iran to decades of oppression

Kurdistan (parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran) should probably be a sovereign country, separate from Iraq.

Sunnis and Shiites hated their swap of power roles after the 2003 invasion. Those who were elected to government post-2003 were too concerned with punishing the others rather than unifying the country.

Also, people lose their minds when basic security is lacking and the policy of debaathification in post-2003 turned out to create a brain drain from government, military, police, and utilities.

Sometimes I wonder if Iraq’s instability was caused by the US’s migration to high tech military, which reduces the need to have 5x the numbers of soldiers on the ground as happened in Japan and Germany.

The only sizable presence of anything of the US origin in Ukraine were Protestant missionaries, unlikely supported or directed by the US government. Everything else was there in such low numbers that it was, essentially, unnoticeable. If anything, the US didn't really pay attention to this part of the world...

The economic growth, or at least the seeds thereof, largely came during Park Chung Hee's dictatorship, which ended in 1979 with his assassination. GDP per capita increased over tenfold during his tenure. The shift towards democracy afterwards was tumultuous for a while, with the first real civilian presidency being Kim Young-sam's in the 90s.

You're definitely right that the growth story is one of the most amazing in history. It's a country roughly the size of Indiana with no natural resources to speak of, and over 50 million people (over 10 million more than California, the most populous state) crammed into the few flatlands it has, being a very mountainous country. Yet it was able to go from an agrarian society to a highly developed nation, with the 12th largest GDP, home to feats like building a third of the world's tonnage of ships. It's absolutely wild.

The Marshall Plan.

And people forget that it had quite a lot of opposition back at home in the US.

While this is logically inconsistent, it is not without a historical precedent. Ancient Athens, during the classical Greek period of the Peloponnesian War when Athens had its empire in the form of the Delian League, was one of the major slaver societies of the entire era, rivaling perhaps even Sparta in the magnitude of slave ownership (though Sparta's slavery was of a very unique form). This is all the while they were decrying Persia's imperial ambitions and touting their fight for liberty against the oppressor. Consider that ancient Athens was the birthplace of democracy, and had one of the purest forms of democracy for what is considered an advanced civilization, to a fault — generals were getting executed for breaking the protocol on burial after the battle they had won (probably how they ended up losing the war). Given all that, one would be right to ask how they could justify promoting liberty and democracy on one hand, and being a slavery-based society on the other. The answer is always that a group of slavers simply does not consider the group that gets enslaved as worthy of having that liberty extended to them — that is the privilege of the "worthy" citizen class. In-group vs the out-group, tribalism and all that.

To go back to the sentence this comment replied to, it is unfortunately entirely believable that a group of racist slavers can be busy promoting liberty for people like themselves while enslaving those who they (conveniently choose to) see as lower than human. Logical consistency and evidence is not required, they are simply different in some way, and thus all is justified.

Did the Soviets really believe in Marxism or did they just want to take over in place of the Tsars? Do the Iranian Mullahs believe in Islam or are they just making up excuses too? Did the Pharoahs believe in their mortuary cult or did they just make that stuff up to con people into stacking up big rocks?

One thing I’ve learned in my time around here is that most people actually do believe what they say they believe and if you listen they will tell you who they are.

The British mostly did believe that their great empire was destined to civilize the world, and the Americans believed they were creating a new Atlantis and that what they were doing to the natives wasn’t actually as bad as it was. They thought they were bringing them the light and saving their souls. Made perfect sense to them at the time given their beliefs. Pharaoh really thought a big pile of rocks would make him immortal.

The problem isn’t that we are all sociopaths making up fake motives to justify crimes. Some people do that, but most don’t. The real problem is that a whole lot of what we believe is deeply flawed and we aren’t smart or experienced or objective enough to see it. We get caught up in self reinforcing ideologies and in systems that become ends in themselves. We also get ridden around by our brain stems and driven by emotions and urges that we rationalize so well we con ourselves.

Hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Conspiratorial models of history are comforting. It’s more comforting to believe it’s all just evil sociopathy since that suggests that if we can just get good people in there they can give us some kind of utopia. The reality is that if we get good people in there they will fuck up, be corrupted by power, or delude themselves. We know this because we’ve already tried many times.

We are just not that smart.

Most car accidents are not the result of homicidal maniacs trying to run people down. Most of them happen because we are bad at driving cars. We are even worse at setting grand historical visions to create utopias.

This is why the best systems we’ve come up with are full of checks and balances and are designed to be deliberative and cautious. It’s a way of protecting us from ourselves.

Getting back to US foreign policy, the real problem is that while our country’s founders did a good job creating such a system for domestic affairs they left foreign policy under specified. This left it as a domain where “good” people high on their own supply could embark on adventures without appropriate peer review.

Government of all things with its monopoly on force should be as boring and bureaucratic as possible. Adventuring should be allowed in limited consensual domains only.

And as much as some people on the Internet think this is a Very Bad Thing, oil is and was a critical part of the global economy. An unstable dictator being able to play games with the world's oil supply isn't just a Very Bad Thing for imaginary mustache-twirling capitalists in their monocles and top hats. It's a Very Bad Thing for anyone who has a job or who relies on global trade. Which is, well, everyone. Which is why a multinational coalition under UN authority, which included several other Arab countries, put Saddam back in his place.

Turkey always had a demographic problem, just like Iran does, it’s not in the EU because it could not resolve its own demographic problem not that it’s demographic problem was somehow due to the EU closing the door on Turkey’s membership.

I mean, i often argue with a friend who think that the CIA best operations are those we don't know, but imho it's conspiracy thinking, and the CIA was caught, many, many times. Also there was no real proof for the Shah that the CIA was this involved (until like 5 years ago when the CIA just declassified and admitted it), which to me is quite impressive.

What you are essentially talking about is mob rule (direct democracy) which is a risk for any government, but for it to really manifest in a way that threatens the state it has to fail to balance the basic needs of the people and also become out of touch with any of their strong expectations which go beyond the basic needs.

If people have low expectations and have adapted to their environment, then it's not that much of a threat. This gets further solidified by punishing anyone that goes against the state and censoring any information that is inconvenient.

Many authoritarian governments have failed to be comprehensive in handling those aspects, but increasingly the oppression and control of people is becoming perfected.

The assumption that all people everywhere have sufficient opportunity, free communication, education and numbers to successfully push back against their government and thus it is always their fault that their government exists seems like a result of overlooking the very long study of imbalances in power between people and government. You cannot leave this to an assumption as an uncontestable law, which is precisely why the United States is setup the way it is to make sure the people have power and communication in order to check the government.

Relative to anarchy, sure. The problem with this construction is it deterministically leads to anarchy, from time to time, which is miserable not only for the people involved but also for all of their neighbours. The point of peaceful transitions of power is avoiding that interregnal anarchy.

The weste had the chance togo through a science-fueled phase which won the minds against religion and so as a CONSEQUENCE people were convinced.

Now the biggest wave is religious fundamentalism (whatever that means by the way) so people follow that as the sheeps they are.

Democracy is the best system at the exception of the others, but its not perfect and can be challenged or abused

However, the first one broke out after a complicated system of alliances together with a non compromising attitude towards nationalism (assasination ultimatum). I file that under ideology and honor.

The second one broke out due to a really insane ideology, that although talked about resources, time and time again took resources from the war itself for its death apparatus

Of course, it's much easier and cheaper these days to use your intelligence services to stage a coup in that country so that your corporations can get their bananas for free, or, planting fake WMD intelligence at the UN so you can justify going in guns blazing and your corporations can make money through weapons sales, oil extraction, logistics and reconstruction on the back of taxpayers and the intelligence services by running heroin to fund their black ops.

To wit: “…much of [balance-of-power politics] theory was based on agrarian states or early industrial states. And one of the features of agrarian interstate relations was that returns to war outpaced returns to capital, which is a fancy way of saying you could get richer, faster by conquest than by development. Under those sorts of conditions, most powers were going to be, in some form, ‘revisionist’ powers because most powers would have something to gain by attacking a weaker neighbor and seizing their resources (mostly arable land and peasant farmers to be taxed). Indeed that basic interaction creates much of the ‘churn’ of interstate anarchy: everyone has an incentive to prey on their neighbors, creating the dog-eat-dog brutality of interstate interactions. The only countries without such an interest would be countries that were very small and weak, seeking to avoid being absorbed themselves.

But, as we’ve discussed, industrialization changes all of this: the net returns to war are decreased (because industrial war is so destructive and lethal) while the returns to capital investment get much higher due to rising productivity. In the pre-industrial past, fighting a war to get productive land was many times more effective than investing in irrigation and capital improvements to your own land, assuming you won the war. But in the industrial world, fighting a war to get a factory is many, many less times more effective than just building a new factory at home, especially since the war is very likely to destroy the factory in the first place. This was not always the case! The great wealth of many countries and indeed industrialization itself was built on resources acquired through imperial expansion; now the cost of that acquisition is higher than simply buying the stuff. War is no longer a means to profit, but an emergency response to avoid otherwise certain extreme losses.

So whereas in the old system, almost every power except potentially the hegemon, had something to potentially gain by upending the stability of the system, the economics of modern production means that quite a lot of countries will have absolutely nothing to gain from a war, even a successful one. Now that dispassionate calculation has arguably been true for more than a century; the First World War was an massive exercise in proving that nothing that could be gained from a major power war would be worth the misery, slaughter and destruction of a major power war. Subsequent conflicts have reinforced this lesson again and again, yet conflicts continue to occur. Azar Gat argues in part that this is because humans are both evolved in our biology (and thus patterns of thinking and emotion) as well as our social institutions, for warfare and aggression. We have to unlearn those instincts and redesign those institutions and this process is slow and uneven.”

https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coa...