In a country of 90 million, if the regime has 20% supporters, that’s 18 million supporters.
Tehran population is 9 million, 20% of that is 1.8 million.
So it’s easy to understand why you might see videos of hundreds or thousands of regime supporters in the streets. That doesn’t mean they’re the majority.
Maybe they should go be the boots on the ground for the next quagmire if it's so important to them? Commander in Chief Bonespurs and the Secretary of Booze can lead the charge straight up the Straight.
Or maybe they should just focus on being Americans in America and some day Iran will sort itself out without the US' "help".
why do we have a moral obligation to help? and why them? there are many places on Earth with a lot worse situation for citizens than Iranians, do we have a moral obligation to help everyone and prioritize?
again, why do we care? about this region in particular. and for whom
would it be “game-changing” other than Israel?
> we have to be pragmatic and choose our battles
this sounds very far removed from “we have a moral obligation”
bottom line, we should not give two shits about what is happening there and we even went voting for a candidate who told us he’ll be the one to make sure we don’t give two shits about it except of course he turned out to be worse than all previous ones combined :)
Surely you can steel man this yourself. Iran wants nukes. Iran has stated it would like to destroy the US and Israel. Israel is an outpost of Western democracy and our ally. Iran has missiles that can reach Europe. Iran is an ally of Russia and China. Iran wants to control the passageway for a big chunk of the world's oil. Cooperation between Israel and its neighbors would be a great asset to the world economy.
This is not comprehensive and maybe you can quibble with some of it, but it is not mysterious why we might care.
>Israel is an outpost of Western democracy and our ally.
The former is a meaningless characteristic when said democracy commits a genocide and runs an apartheid state (hard to deny with the recent capital punishment law exclusively for Palestinian prisoners). Hardly model behavior for anyone else in the region to emulate. The latter is meaningless since this ally only ever drags us into problems, almost all of which are of its own making.
> Cooperation between Israel and its neighbors would be a great asset to the world economy.
It's easier to cooperate with your neighbors when you stop squatting on their territory, or stop massacring them.
>but it is not mysterious why we might care.
I think "people who care" should volunteer to serve in the IDF, and leave the rest of America out of it. Kinda like the various low-friction pipelines for people to go fight/die for Ukraine without committing US Service Members to such a wasteful endeavor.
I'm well aware of the insane perspective of Iranian monarchists in America. Frankly it's not really their fault, American interventionists have pushed them into this brainrot.
But having an opinion doesn't make it a good opinion and there is no way to say "please get my grandmother's blood on your hands for my insane vision of Iran" sanely.
Thanks, I hadn’t seen that article before. Interesting read.
My take is that GAMAAN likely overstates the opposition, but all surveys on Iran are imperfect, not just GAMAAN.
I know Pew has done surveys in Iran, but didn’t directly ask if people support the regime.
I personally believe that the opposition group is larger than the regime supporters. I think there’s enough data to infer that.
But I’ll also admit that there’s probably a sizable percentage of ambivalent/non-revolutionary Iranians who would just be satisfied with a better economy.
Here was one survey that showed 81% disapproval of the Islamic Republic: https://gamaan.org/2023/02/04/protests_survey/
In a country of 90 million, if the regime has 20% supporters, that’s 18 million supporters.
Tehran population is 9 million, 20% of that is 1.8 million.
So it’s easy to understand why you might see videos of hundreds or thousands of regime supporters in the streets. That doesn’t mean they’re the majority.