DuToit, as is his usual wont, knows what’s up.
Frankly, I’m uneasy with the entire concept of “regime change” as a foreign policy goal, because if history has taught us anything — especially in the Middle East — it’s that most of these noble efforts are pretty much doomed to failure, because the entire premise is faulty. Changing a regime is no guarantee that the next regime will be any better than the previous one.
Here’s the unalterable fact: democratic capitalism, as a concept and guiding socio-political principle, doesn’t work outside the confines of Western civilization, and by “Western civilization” I mean pretty much the United States. This is because Western civilization cannot coexist within a nation along with lunatic and highly-flawed political systems like Marxism and/or lunatic medieval social systems like Islam.
One only has to see how the UK, to use but one example, has been undermined by the baleful effects of both the above — Marxism as a home-grown poison (hello, Labour Party) and Islam as an imported poison (hello, untrammeled Muslim immigration).
And that’s within a nation which pretty much gave birth to democratic capitalism. (They did, too; we just perfected it.) Now try to see how well democratic capitalism has worked in other countries which have never had that system as a bedrock principle — Iraq, Syria, Egypt, China, the whole of Africa etc. — and all you’ll find is a constant and comprehensive list of failures. You can change regimes, by all means: but the plain fact of the matter is that democratic capitalism is probably going to fail as the “new” regime will pretty much be just a (watered-down at best) copy of earlier regimes, none of which have espoused democratic capitalism. They’ll be kleptocracies like all the African shitholes, or neo-Communist like Vietnam, or military juntas like [insert South American country of choice here]. (Augusto Pinochet’s Chilean junta, by the way, was very much the exception.)
So I’m simply regarding the destruction of the current Iranian Islamic regime as a side-benefit of the whole exercise.
What we should be stating, in no uncertain terms, is that any regime which exports terrorism or socio-political poisons like Islam or Marxism are on notice that the United States may, at our own discretion, pound these regimes back into rubble rather than allow them to subvert peace and prosperity — the two are very much linked — in the names of their respective ideologies. “Regime change” is very much a subset of that goal, and not its primary purpose. (SecWar Pete Hegseth, at least, has the right of it.)
Not surprising in the least, that last; as I’ve indirectly as well as directly stated here ever since he first signed on as SecWar, he pretty much always does. Sec Hegseth is a lot like DuToit himself in that regard.
- Entries
One of the differences with Iran compared to other shithole countries is that before the Islamic takeover it was a fairly liberal modern country and a lot of the folks there remember that or have been told about how good it was.
That, coupled with the watchful eye of the US, may be enough of an impetus to stymie backsliding by any new regime.
Agree with H. that Iran is a different case than the average 3rd world shithole. I think they are ready for a republic modeled after the USA. We shall see.
Clearly, sans the USA, the entire European continent would be a communist hellhole, either by conquest or internal takeover.
Britain *might* be a special case. The home of western ideals has been subverted but they *may* be salvageable with help, help that would have to come from us, help in the way of dropping small arms and ammo across the island. At some point there may be a core willing to fight back and they will need weapons.
The real issue is that we have allowed “the slide”.
What we should have done is change any regime that began backsliding into terror or belligerence or any other behavior which prompted us to change the last regime. Repeat as necessary.
What feckless Bush I and II and Clinton and 0 did was pretend the backsliding wasn’t happening and/or that we couldn’t do anything because it was the “will of the people”. AKA they lied about Their Democracy in the same way they lie about Our Democracy.