MAGA celebrity Charlie Kirk, attempting to balance support for the administration and appeal to online isolationists, maintains that the “regime change war machine in D.C.” is pushing President Donald Trump into “an all out blitz on Iran.” He’s not alone.
The question is, what does “regime change war” mean in simple language? Does it mean, as “non-interventionists” suggest, invading Iran and imposing American democracy on its people? Because, if so, there’s virtually no pushing for it. And I only add “virtually” in case I somehow missed a person of consequence, though it is highly unlikely.
Trump, from all indications, is using the threat of the U.S. joining the war to push Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei into surrender. Though taking out Iran’s nuclear program would end the war quicker.
Or does opposing “regime change” mean actively thwarting the Iranian opposition from rising fundamentalists who took power via a violent revolution in 1979? Does it mean ensuring that Khamenei survives because a resulting messy post-war fight for power is worse?
It seems the latter. Kirk says, “There is a vast difference between a popular revolution and foreign-imposed, abrupt, violent regime change.” Surely, he doesn’t believe the mullahs will gradually propose liberal reforms for the people and become peaceful neighbors on their own? If Iranians revolt, it’s because of the violence imposed on the regime.
The ideological overcorrection due to the failures of Iraq’s rebuild now has non-interventionists accusing anyone who proposes that it’s better if anti-American dictatorships fall of being “neocons,” perhaps the most useless phrase in our political lexicon.
Forget for a moment that Iran has been an enemy of the U.S. for 45 years. Not an existential threat, no, but a deadly one, nonetheless. The non-interventionist is not bothered by the Islamic Republic’s murder of American citizens or crusade for nuclear weapons. Until Khamenei plans to drop Revolutionary Guard paratroopers into San Diego, they don’t think it’s any of our business.
Because of this overcorrection, non-interventionists, both left and right, simply can’t fathom that exertion of American power could ever be a good thing. They now create revisionist histories blaming the U.S. for virtually all the world’s ills.
“It was Britain, and (funded by) the United States that overthrew a democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mossedegh in 1953 by using hired mobs in a coup that lead (sic) to the installation of the Shah Pahlavi’s 27 year reign of authoritarianism and human rights abuses. All in the name of Iranian Oil,” wrote comedian Rob Schneider in a viral post.
“Remember,” Charlie Kirk told his followers, “Iran is partially controlled by mullahs today because we designed regime change to put the Shah back in power.”
Boy, I wish people would stay off Wikipedia for a while, because this fantasy, spread by blame-America leftists for decades, is now being picked up by the Right.
The notion that Iran was going to be a thriving democracy in 1954 had the U.S. not gotten involved — and our involvement is way overstated — is more ridiculous than blaming us for the 1979 revolution nearly 30 years later. It is far more likely Iran would have emerged as a Soviet client state destined to fall when fundamentalists swept the Islamic world in the ’70s, anyway.
Realpolitik is ugly. Non-interventionists love to harp on the deadly byproducts of our intrusions into world affairs — and there have been many — without ever grappling with the counterfactual outcome.
For instance, the contention that “regime change” never works is incredibly simplistic. Regime change was a success in Germany and Japan. And I bet the Hungarians, Czechs, Slovenians, Estonians and many others were all on board for regime change, as well. None of that happens without the U.S. intervening in conflicts, cold and hot, around the world.
People will rightly point out that Europe is not the Middle East. In that regard, Iran is not Iraq or Syria. Schneider contends that “90 million people will fight for their survival again,” as they did in Iraq. Some Iranians might fight to preserve the brutal Islamic regime. Many would not. The real fear should be that a civil war would break out. There are numerous minorities in Iran, but Persian national consciousness goes back to antiquity. If the mullahs fall, a majority of Iranians may turn out to fight for a better life free of needless conflicts with the West. It may go south. It may not. I have no idea how that turns out, and neither do you.
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