Iran US relations: Tehran demands the release of frozen assets upfront and adds Yemen conditions following the collapse of a prior agreement, hardening its stance against Washington in the ongoing Middle East conflict.
In Iran, thousands have been killed and their stance does not seem to change. In the USA, gas has gone up and that has done more to sway Americans against trump than the knowledge their government is actively killing thousands around the world, including women and children, without a second thought.
So the answer here is twofold: First, that’s not being hardened fanatics; that’s a difference in popular will. America has very little popular will to prosecute this war (because it’s stupid and unnecessary and Trump didn’t even try to sell the American public on it), so even relatively minor setbacks or consequences produce outsized popular resentment. It’s also important to note here that Americans don’t meaningfully care about the humanitarian impact of their military’s escapades, so “done more to sway Americans against trump than the knowledge their government is actively killing thousands around the world” isn’t exactly a high bar. Meanwhile, though we can’t know for sure because not much information is coming out of Iran these days, Iran presumably has a lot of popular will to prosecute the war because America and Israel are bombing their schools and hospitals. Would you want your country (presumably America) to surrender if, say, Russia started bombing your country? As long as you have a meaningful avenue of resistance, you’d want to do that until you return the favor to them twice over. That’s exactly what the British thought, so much so that even after losing an order of magnitude more people out of a smaller population in less time than Iran they not only didn’t surrender, they beat back the Germans and went on to fight them in three continents, bankrupting their country, losing their empire in and enduring harsh wartime rationing in the process. As history has repeatedly shown, terror bombing doesn’t work. That’s not a trait of hardened fanatics; that’s just being human.
And of course second, even if the Iranian public wanted to surrender, that doesn’t matter much (unless shit really hits the fan), because the people who would actually make the decision to surrender aren’t the public; they’re the ruling class, who are in a better position to weather the storm than the average Iranian. They’re also likely to very much not want to surrender because it’s their corrupt rule at stake.
The Oriental fanatic to whom life is cheap contrasted with the enlightened and/or decadent white man is a an age-old trope, but put in context it’s not one with a lot of explanatory power.
So the answer here is twofold: First, that’s not being hardened fanatics; that’s a difference in popular will. America has very little popular will to prosecute this war (because it’s stupid and unnecessary and Trump didn’t even try to sell the American public on it), so even relatively minor setbacks or consequences produce outsized popular resentment. It’s also important to note here that Americans don’t meaningfully care about the humanitarian impact of their military’s escapades, so “done more to sway Americans against trump than the knowledge their government is actively killing thousands around the world” isn’t exactly a high bar. Meanwhile, though we can’t know for sure because not much information is coming out of Iran these days, Iran presumably has a lot of popular will to prosecute the war because America and Israel are bombing their schools and hospitals. Would you want your country (presumably America) to surrender if, say, Russia started bombing your country? As long as you have a meaningful avenue of resistance, you’d want to do that until you return the favor to them twice over. That’s exactly what the British thought, so much so that even after losing an order of magnitude more people out of a smaller population in less time than Iran they not only didn’t surrender, they beat back the Germans and went on to fight them in three continents, bankrupting their country, losing their empire in and enduring harsh wartime rationing in the process. As history has repeatedly shown, terror bombing doesn’t work. That’s not a trait of hardened fanatics; that’s just being human.
And of course second, even if the Iranian public wanted to surrender, that doesn’t matter much (unless shit really hits the fan), because the people who would actually make the decision to surrender aren’t the public; they’re the ruling class, who are in a better position to weather the storm than the average Iranian. They’re also likely to very much not want to surrender because it’s their corrupt rule at stake.
The Oriental fanatic to whom life is cheap contrasted with the enlightened and/or decadent white man is a an age-old trope, but put in context it’s not one with a lot of explanatory power.
thanks for the detailed explanation