My understanding is that on the grassroots level there isn’t a ton of support for the Iranian regime in Iran. There is some, but its not a majority or anything.
If the Iranian regime did change due to internal rebellion and did things like sign a peace treaty with Israel and agreed to stop funding proxies, what would that mean for the middle east?
Would Saudi Arabia and Iran still be fighting for power in the greater middle east with a more secular government?
Who would Israels main enemies be at that point? Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. Syria is too mired in civil war to care about Israel, and Saudi Arabia is looking at a peace treaty with Israel. Would Turkey start to become the main anti-Israel influence in the region?
Hamas had control of funding in Gaza, which they used to fund terror infrastructure. Since they aren’t in charge of Gaza now, they lose funding. So if regimes that stop terror in the West bank and Gaza take over that would suppress a lot of terrorist activity. Hezbollah gets something like a billion a year from Iran. Would Hezbollah still exist without Iranian support?
Given your hypothetical, and given how quickly things could change, Israel would need proof that Iran is no longer seeking to build nuclear weapons before it could no longer consider Iran a threat, and yes, I realize the hypocrisy there. To demonstrate that Iran was no longer trying to stir up trouble in the region they would also need to see funding dry up for anti-Israel terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. If both of those things actually happened, and Iran was no longer pushing for the destruction of Israel, there might be a chance for some kind of nonaggression pact between the two countries.
Iran and Saudi Arabia could also find common ground if they wanted, but their hatred towards each other goes back quite a while. As far as who would Israel focus on instead of Iran? I don’t see Turkey, a NATO member, as a direct threat to Israel, although I may be naive in my thinking.
In general, I wouldn’t say that there’s a lot of love between the various countries of the Middle East.
Realistically, I’d say that there are three things driving instability in the region:
Iran
Oil money
Hereditary power transfer
Getting rid of one of those would, I’m sure, improve the situation. Pair that with a move to solar and batteries and I’d gradually expect the region to finally start to settle down a bit or, at least, stop being of concern to most people.
But, so long as the oil money flows in, I’d still expect that sub-princes and the like will be using their excess funds to muck around with regional stability, trying to jockey their way into ultimate power.
Minus the money, it still won’t be the best place until more stable political systems come in, but it should cease being such a concern.
ISTM the US (and, later, Israel got into the picture in terms of relations with Iran) picked their side when they overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953. Israel and Iran could have been allies in the Middle East, but they’re not.
Didn’t that election have a “stop the count” moment?
Didn’t Mosaddegh try to ban illiterate people from voting, but failed, then he tried to make rural votes count less than urban ones, and failed again, and finally he just stopped the 1952 election midway in order to avoid counting the rural votes that would have made him lose?
He sounds less like a democratically elected leader to me, and more like what Trump would have been had Jan 6 gone his way.
In hindsight, 1953 was a mistake because it led to 1979; but painting Mosaddegh as democratic or representing the will of the people is pretty silly.
Hypothetically, having democratically-elected governments throughout the Middle East not dominated or heavily influenced by hate-spewing religious extremists would make possible long term stability and cooperation in the region.
Or a glowing celestial unicorn could descend, and command peace.
Those are fair points, but I am saying you still had foreign involvement (in the shape of the CIA and friends) in an Iranian coup-d’etat, and it did influence what happened in 1979 and afterwards.
It’s not so straightforward to ban someone from politics for being religious. How do you go about rooting them out? The problem is not religion at all, of course: you need something like anti-hate-speech measures.
First from the OP: [quote=“Wesley_Clark, post:1, topic:1008449”]
on the grassroots level there isn’t a ton of support for the Iranian regime in Iran.
[/quote]
Could be true, but I have no evidence one way or the other?
Anyone with first-hand experience?
I don’t know a lot about revolutions in Iran. The 1953 one seems to have installed a pro-western regime (possibly a puppet government?) Were the CIA (and/or Israel) involved in that?
Then there was the 1979 Islamic revolution. Again, were the CIA (and/or Israel) involved in that? If so, one wonders what were their motives since the previous regime appears to have been more aligned with what we call ‘western’ values?
Aside: we’re getting rather off the OP here and into historical matters.
Might be better to spin off a new topic?
Not first hand but I’m guessing you are familiar with the recent major protest movements there after the death of Mahsa Amini in police protest, which forced some roll back on the hard line along with violent suppression of dissent, hand in hand. The people have not been happy.
And at least in the early days after October 7th there was significant dissent from the pro Hamas cheering by many there:
Their economy is crap and odds are great that broad swaths of the public does NOT want it wrecked more by direct conflict with Israel, or even spending to rebuild destroyed proxies, instead of rebuilding their own economy.
The hypothetical of internal rebellion seems improbable, but the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is 85, and, well …
Rivalry with the Saudis is one thing, but I wonder what the Chinese and Russians want to happen, and how their increased influences would impact any detente with Israel and what happens in the aftermath of that hypothetical.
Don’t know since I have no knowledge of the internal politics or what forces may be driving them?
But I guess there will be a new Ayatollah?
Meet the new boss: same as the old boss…
We saw some of what might happen in the years leading up to and after the Iran Nuclear Deal.
It’s not reasonable to expect an overnight revolution that will turn out the religious fanatics, and replace them with reasonable people. If that happens, great, but we can’t expect it.
But what the nuclear deal did was, it showed that the more reasonable factions in Iran could negotiate with the US and the west in general, and actually gain some things for Iran. By showing a good-faith effort to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions, they got the west to free up a lot of financial resources that had been locked up since the 1979 revolution, and also eased some of the other trading sanctions that have limited Iran’s economy for decades.
And that did produce at least some decrease in Iran’s foreign adventures in supporting Terrorists. they didn’t stop everything overnight, but the moderates had gained enough standing to make the fanatics roll back some of the worst of what they were doing.
Of course, Trump killed that, and thus also killed the moderates’ gains. Now we’re worse off than before.
But that shows what is possible. A gradual reduction in the level of conflict, by supporting the moderate factions against the fanatics. But it requires long-term commitments on our part, and a willingness to actually give Iran something of value for ceasing the worst of their activities. At this point, we’ll probably never be “friends”, certainly not within most of our lifetimes, but we could aspire to “not actively trying to kill each other”.
That’s what would have to be seen. Certainly no one getting there can be in posting to get there without having been a good foot soldier in service of the old boss. One person that source I read place high in sweepstakes is Alireza Arafi. But who knows what his actual vision for the future would be.
Although the core assumption of American foreign policy with regard to the Middle East is that post-revolutionary Iran is the major shit-stirrer in the region and that Israel is the firm friend to the US in a region that is otherwise mostly hostile to American interests—and this is the mantra that is repeated by American media writ large regardless of political leanings of any individual outlet—the reality is that the Middle East is a region with such a broad history of ethnic, religious, economic, and social conflicts that trying to summarize them in a few paragraphs or posit that one regime change will harmonize the entire region is inevitably facile and egregiously reductionist. The political problems created by the Skyes-Picot Agreement and the resultant drawing of national lines through long-established ethnic groups and ignoring existing polities certainly engendered many of today’s conflicts, but a lot of these problems extend back centuries and were merely repressed (or not publicized) by the Ottoman Empire before its partition and dissolution following World War I, and then have been enhanced by the involvement of many Western governments (primarily the British and then the United States) covertly fucking around with internal politics and funding wars that we saw as being in our (i.e. oil companies) best interests.
Layer on top of this the stress that climate change and massive wealth inequality has and will continue to have on populations in the region, and the best that regime change in Iran might do is remove one player in funding insurgencies, likely to be replaced by another, likely the Erdoğan-led Türkiye which has already shown a desire to become the regional hegemony. For sure, Israel has never had a problem finding (and sometimes producing) willing enemies, and everybody is going to keep bashing on the Kurds. Wahhabist Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and Shia fundamentalists in Iran will stoke any embers of conflict to pursue their schism, and don’t get me started on the jihadist Salafists seeking to establish a global caliphate imposing Sharia law on the world.
As dysfunctional as it is, Iran is one of the more stable and pragmatic polities in the Middle East, and while the current leadership is aversive to Western interests (not without reason) they’ve also been willing to step up to the table and negotiate when there was benefit to them to do so. Yanking the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (i.e. the “Iran nuclear deal”) out from under them pretty much undermined any good faith they might have in dealing with Western nations or the United Nations as a whole regardless of what regime is in charge.
I would say definitely. The origins of the Iran-Saudi conflict might be in the sunni-shia religious divide but it’s really more of a traditional nationalist “great power” rivalry nowadays. Kinda like Britain and Spain in the 1700s, it may have started as a Catholic-vs-Protestant but by then it was a nationalist standoff based on alliances an political expediency
And even the current authoritarian governments are replaced the populace will become no less religious, a democratic government is likely to be pretty religiously motivated too.
It isn’t terror though provoking Israel into further settlement building. Or the 1400 incidents of settler-initiated violence of the last year (that’s a UN number, not hamas) which, with roles reversed, would undoubtedly be called terrorism.