I realize of course that capriciousness is a hallmark of Trump’s essence, but I do wonder if his recently consistent bellicosity is scraping some who had bought into his past isolationist positions on foreign entanglements. Yes I appreciate that he has the instincts of a school yard bully, but still, I think a chunk of his base had bought into that mindset.
Come on now. Putting boots on the ground in Iran couldn’t possibly “entangle” the US in anything! /s
Americans sometimes refer to embarrassment as fatal. ‘I thought I was going to die!’
Iran is entering what I believe is its third day without Internet or telephone lines, as the protests continue to intensify. The police is shooting protesters with live ammunition, reportedly over 200 are dead in Tehran alone.
And they still don’t have water, of course. Whyever not? Well, the enormous investment they’ve made in trying to rebuild missiles and launchers and ramp up production in preparation for another go-around with Israel have apparently proven more important to Iranian leadership than water infrastructure.
Could Iran’s overextension on military spending lead to the regime’s collapse as happened to the Soviet Union? That might be a bit optimistic, but we can only hope.
Both Trump and Iranian leadership are doing their share of saber rattling. It makes more sense on Iran’s end than Trump’s. A war could distract the population and buy Iran’s leadership time.
I can understand why it is hard when you read something like this in today’s news:
I’m sure the USA doesn’t stand ready to help. Then, I don’t know what help even a normal U.S. administration could give in advance of a regime change.
The current Iranian government is thoroughly rotten. There’s at least a hope, if the protestors are motivated enough, that they’ll replace that government with something better. But unfortunately, historical precedent suggests that things will probably just end up even worse. I think that realistically, the best we can expect is that the nation (under either the old regime or a new one) ends up too weakened to make life horrible for anyone outside of their borders.
Sometime you got to remind yourself that not everything in the world is about Trump.
That’s my grim prognosis too but I have a little hope.
I agree, but he does make it easy. This came out about twenty minutes ago in the New York Times
Trump Is Briefed on Options for Striking Iran as Protests Continue
I cannot imagine how foreign intervention could help. I hope the Iranian regime is overthrown before the U.S. gets to it.
He just can’t help sticking his nose where it’s not needed or wanted, can he? God forbid the news talk about something other than Trump for five minutes.
Are we going to abduct another head of state and “run” their country to? Wouldn’t this be violating some other dictators backyard?
Unlike many of those other cases, Iran is a real country with a shared history of unification. That lends itself to better outcomes than countries with arbitrary borders enforced by outsiders on disparate people.
I can understand why internal internet is down (stop protest planning and communication).
But it looks to me that the big Iranian-sponsored news web sites are either not updating or are, as in these cases, down not just in Iran, but globally, per onlineornot.com:
Does anyone know of a web site that tells you how long they have been out, and, ideally, how that compares to the 2019 protests?
This outside opposition site, up because of that, is said to be Saudi funded, but as far as I can tell is in the ballpark of legitimacy:
Reports I’m seeing say Starlink is down in Iran. It isn’t clear to me if this is unprecedented, but this says it is:
The protest movement appears unorganized and leaderless and at least from what we can tell the Iranian security state appears cohesive. In these circumstances I would be skeptical that the regime will be overthrown though they will probably have to make some concessions to public opinion.
That’s what things looked like at this stage in 2011 in Egypt, and in 1989 in Romania. Then things changed.
So far, what’s changed is that the number of reported deaths has doubled to the mid 400s.
In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood was a much more organized force than anything that exists in Iran and proved important in the latter stages of the revolution. In Romania, like in other regimes in Eastern Europe, they were hugely dependent on external support from the Soviet Union and became vulnerable when that was suddenly withdrawn by Gorbachev. The Iranian regime is much more self-sufficient.
The Iranian regime is “self sufficient” in that it has relatively little to do with outsiders. But to be “self sufficient” you don’t just need to be without help, you also have to be getting along fine without said help, and that’s the part Iran struggles with.
The security state in Iran is self-sufficient when it comes to being able to repress domestic protest movements whereas for example East European governments in 1956 and 1968 needed Soviet troops to do this.
I also think it works to the regime’s advantage that it has had a lot of practice in suppressing protests in recent decades whereas the Ceausescu regime , for example, was famously stunned when the public turned against it.