An excellent suggestion was made to concentrate Iran conversation and posting to this mega thread. Please keep as much as you can here so that the main feed isn’t overburdened by Iran news.

  • cabbage@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    Iran has been a headache for a long time. Much like in America and Israel, violent religious fundamentalists took control over society and installed a reign of terror.

    This has of course been bad for the Iranians, but America of course could not care less about that. However, Iran has been a major concern for Israel, as they are an unreliable an aggressive neighbour. Again, don’t let the irony get lost on you. The threat of Iran maybe managing to develop nukes has been a particularly salient issue, and perhaps one of the driving forces behind Israel getting its own nukes decades ago.

    In short, Israel just cannot feel safe with the current rule in Iran. Or so the Israeli far right has insisted for decades, anyways. Keeping this fear high on the agenda has been key to winning elections and to get in place the far right genocidal lunatics currently in the Israeli government. Along with the fear of Palestinians of course.

    The US is of course loyal allies of Israel as their one true friend in a region full of oil. The Saudis are of course also good friends whenever they are not actively attacking America and killing civilians or journalists, but they are not quite as good at lobbying. So American interests and Israeli interests are pretty much the same, and the Iranian regime has been the face of evil for decades. Conveniently they are also super evil, so it’s easy to make propaganda.

    Recently the Iranian regime has murdered a bunch of civilians who protest the regime. The US and Israel wouldn’t usually care about dead civilians in the middle east - they certainly wouldn’t oppose it at least - but right now it provides a convenient excuse to bomb the fuck out of Iran. Trump needs this because he needs support before the upcoming election- a successful impeachment might allow the opposition to grow teeth, and if they do he could end up locked away for life.

    Netanyahu is in even deeper ship than Trump, with corruption charges at home and crimes against humanity abroad. Now that his genocide in Palestine is getting old he needs something new to keep him in power.

    Iran responds to attack by sending missiles towards American military bases in the area. American military bases are located in the surrounding countries, which is why you see newspaper headlines making out as if Iran is launching a war on every country in the regioun. They’re not, they’re just trying to strike back against America and Israel. Just like the Americans and Israelis they suck at hitting military targets and often end up hitting civilian ones instead.

      • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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        12 hours ago

        Yeah, it’s like Russia’s endless appetite for “buffer states.” Hard to justify when you have the world’s longest border.

      • cabbage@piefed.social
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        1 day ago

        All fascists need a good enemy, obliviate one and you have to move on to the next. The only end game to this bullshit is total apocalypse. Which of course is what the evangelical Christian supporters of Israel has been cheering for all along.

        • HenriVolney@sh.itjust.works
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          1 day ago

          Rome did it first: becoming a war-led society while fighting for their survival, then erasing the only other superpower of the time, then conquering each and every land and people around the Mediterranean sea, while pretending that they were defending themselves or their allies. Took a millenia to collapse.

          • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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            12 hours ago

            then conquering each and every land and people around the Mediterranean sea

            Not to mention the genocide Caesar led against the Gauls. And they went far beyond the Med. Last I checked, Britain is not a Mediterranean country.

      • YappyMonotheist@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        I mean, the whole point of Western imperialism, since its very beginning, was complete world dominance and Israel is a Western colony. And they got pretty close at some point (the Brits and the French devoured Africa and Asia, for example, and Algeria was a French colony up until the 1950s!), and the repercussions are felt today still, but at this point it kinda seems like an unfeasible dream (not that they’re not gonna try, ofc). The world is bigger than the West, once more, or at least that seems to be the trajectory.