Guest Post from an Iranian
scottaaronson.blog
scottaaronson.blog
Maybe GP was asking about previous Yugoslavia war, where AFAIR there was no intervention and massacres continued for quite long.
The pretext for the Iraq war was that they were involved in 9/11 and possessed weapons of mass destruction.
This Guardian article[0] is a wonderful little window into the zeitgeist of the time. You can see that many commentators explicitly cite the "brutal dictator" rationale, notably Salman Rushdie.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/jan/19/foreignpoli...
But, whatever the rationale amongst the rest of the "Coalition of the Willing" might have been, the core claim of the war's instigators in the US was WMD. Regime change was a mechanism for decisively eliminating terrorist threats.
It's a hard problem and I don't know what to do about it, especially since (as a sibling comment mentions), sometimes you can improve the situation. Other times you will make it much worse. And I haven't seen a trustworthy way to distinguish the two (lots of interventionist-minded folks claim they have one; I think they're kidding themselves).
Maybe the objective wasn't regime, but I doubt more bombs will do that? Not after so many years of sanctions.
Sadly, I don't see any positive outcome, short of the regime gracefully collapsing on itself.
Hardening sanctions won't do Iranians any good, but it will make the country poorer and less able to inflict violence on other countries. Which is guess is the logic.
And following the export of drones to Russia, I doubt Europe, which has previously been in favor of fewer sanctions, will oppose more sanctions on Iran.
If only the US administration had friends, they could do something with sanctions. But I guess useless bombing it is, or maybe just nothing -- this is Trump after all.
Sadly, I doubt it matters either way. The regime sponsors terrorism, not reason they wouldn't do it at home.
Oh really? I was under the impression that the US actually armed and funded for two years a genocidal war on Gaza. (Btw in that case Scott Aaronson, far for being concerned, actually argued that Israelis can and should kill as many people as they need to feel safe).
K
And is there really much you can do from the air that wasn't done already?
Either the Iranians do it themselves or it doesn't happen. Sadly, I don't see any good outcomes for the protestors. But you never know, oppressive regimes appear stable, until they are not.
Second this. And it's unlikely to succeed this time as Iranian people sadly do not really want to right now.
Alas, if even if Iran were to normalize relations with the West, he missed Amazon's good years. His video card would probably be a box with a rock in it.
> Some even claim that the protesters are violent rioters and the government has the right to shoot them with war ammunition.
That said, dehumanizing your enemies to the point that their children are fair game is utterly predictable as a message that a blood thirsty Zionist like Scott Aaronson would endorse.
He doesn't know any better, as he wasn't raised to understand right and wrong, he only understands "useful for us" or "harmful to us", but that's still no excuse.
The hard things about having rule of law, is that you generally can't disqualify people from VISAs based on who parents are. And revoking visa granted years ago is even harder.
I think maybe the EU did something like this with some Russian elites, but as I recall they put names of the people into a law.
The rule of law has downsides, but as a whole I'll take it over the alternative any day.