If You Want Freedom and Democracy For Iranian People and All Peoples, You Must Start By Admitting What America Is and Does

we do not liberate, we do not rescue, and we do not permit democracy to get in the way of getting what we want

I’ll tell you guys something - I am never surprised by the degree to which Americans are willing to be irrational about their government, its history, and its relationship to freedom, including and especially some of my readers, but I confess it’s particularly jarring right now.

After all, we literally JUST kidnapped Nicolas Maduro and, rather than instituting elections or even making a wave towards democracy, we hand-picked a successor from within his own regime and explicitly told the world we were going to rule the country for as long as we wanted in order to access its oil. That was a few weeks ago! There is of course very very very little good about Donald Trump, but it’s convenient that he just says the quiet parts out loud, and what he has said, explicitly, is that we have no intention of allowing democracy in Venezuela and that we’re there to exploit its oil reserves. Look up his quotes and see! Trump is a sublimely evil person, just a complete moral failure in every respect, but it’s ultimately good that we can be adults and discuss what’s happening in Venezuela honestly. We don’t care about Venezuelan democracy, we’re going to run the country as long as we want, we’ll never allow a government hostile to the United States or its monetary interests to rule no matter how popular, and we’re doing it for the oil. At least we can have honesty, for once, about why this country does what it does. We don’t care about democracy and human rights, we never have, and we’re not about to start now.

And what fries my noodle, what I find just gobsmacking, is the number of people from all across the political spectrum who believe mere weeks after the Venezuela intervention that the United States is going to intervene in Iran in a way that leads to authentic and real Iranian democracy. My friends, what part of American history, including extremely recent history, do you not understand?

What’s happening in Iran? There have been protests against the ruling theocratic regime for many years, but the war with Israel, endless sanctions, and ongoing economic collapse have left the regime more vulnerable than years. There is, in fact, a base of support for the regime in the country, numbering in the millions. (This is true of any regime that is disfavored by the United States, which of course does not mean that those regimes are legitimate or worthy of defending.) But those are predominantly uneducated and highly-religious people who live in the rural areas of the country, and they don’t speak English and wouldn’t talk to American reporters if they could. They’re not on Twitter, and The New York Times prefers to pretend they don’t exist for ideological reasons, so they have no voice in Western media. There is also a very authentic and passionate protest movement against the current regime, an ideologically varied one. Many of those people also hate the United States and Israel and don’t want them influencing anything in Iran; again, those people are inconvenient for the official narrative and so the American media works hard to suppress their voices. Why would there be this big group of Iranians who hate the current regime and also hate the United States? Because the United States is directly responsible for the current regime, of course.

Mohammed Mossadegh was an Iranian member of Parliament who became prime minister of the country in the early 1950s. People who attempt to justify American hegemony love to complain about the legitimacy of his election, but by the standards of the Middle East in 1952, it was a free and fair election. Mossadegh immediately moved to end British exploitation of Iranian oil, and for good reason: the status quo was, simply, a terrible ripoff, exploitative by any definition and a legacy of British colonialism. Iran was a poor country with large reserves of the world’s most important resource, and they needed to get a better return on that resource in order to stop being poor. But the British preferred for the ripping off to continue, thank you, so they asked the CIA to depose Mossadegh and reinstall the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. The CIA cheerfully complied. Mossadegh was imprisoned for “treason” and confined to house arrest for the last years of his life - he was literally buried under the floorboards of his house to avoid any political blowback - and the Shah reigned as a cruel and authoritarian dictator. Notably, in terms of illegitimately enriching himself, he might have been the single most corrupt leader in world history. To help him, the CIA took an active role in establishing SAVAK, the Shah’s notoriously brutal secret police force that jailed, tortured, and murdered dissidents and protestors. Over time, the corruption and brutality of the Shah’s regime became so punishing that it empowered internal resistance, with the most organized and effective anti-government forces coming from Ruhollah Khomeini’s Shi’a Islamist movement. A series of ugly crackdowns culminated in the Black Friday Massacre, where perhaps 100 Iranian protestors were slaughtered by Pahlavi’s goons. The United States clung to support of the Shah like death, but over time his hold on Iran became untenable, and he fled into exile; Khomeini’s factions won the scramble for power and he was declared Supreme Leader of an explicitly theocratic Iranian state. The Shah bounced around for a brief period until the United States took him in as he was dying of cancer, despite the fact that the American government was entirely aware of how brutal, autocratic, and corrupt Pahlavi’s rule had been. (After all, we had helped ensure that he remain empowered to be brutal, autocratic, and corrupt.) This decision to protect Pahlavi enflamed the Iranian people who had so recently fought for justice against the Shah’s regime and had demanded his extradition to serve trial for his crimes. America’s decision to shelter him led directly to the Iranian embassy takeover and hostage crisis, a detail that Americans often ignore when discussing that event. This development directly played into the hands of Khomeini and was a key part of establishing his total control of the country. And thus the current Iranian regime is indisputably a direct result of American actions.

Absolutely nothing in the preceding paragraph is historically disputable. That’s what happened. And the question is, are you going to allow that history to inform how you understand complex and difficult scenarios like the one we’re currently seeing in Iran? I think you should, and I think you should understand: there’s nothing lefty or idealistic or unfair about understanding that the United States does not liberate oppressed peoples. That is not what this country does and that is not who we are. Now, Trump administration insiders like Mike Pompeo above are saying openly that Tehran is full of Israeli and American operatives who will be working to ensure that any post-Islamist Iranian regime is a pliable one that comports to American and Israeli military and economic preferences. You can read plenty of analysts in the media and academia (people who are no friends of the current regime) who will also tell you that this influence is obvious; there are many credible reports of the Israeli and American security apparatus manipulating the protests to get what they want. In other words, they have no more intention of allowing real democracy in Iran - that is, democracy led by the Iranian people - than they do in Venezuela.

Who is the preferred choice of the American security state? Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah, who intends to restore Iranian monarchy. (You may note that monarchy is not democracy.) He has been repeatedly accused of misrepresenting his level of support in the country, and his cadre has often been accused of harassment and violence by other dissidents, as the above-linked NYT piece points out. Most disturbingly, Pahlavi has consistently refused to denounce the torture and corruption and autocracy of his father’s rule, despite having been given many occasions to do so over the course of decades. Whether Pahlavi would be able to consolidate power in a post-Islamist Iran remains to be seen, but if not him, there will surely be other candidates for American and Israeli manipulation, directly against the principles of non-interference and democracy. The Trump administration, again, is making no bones about its intentions, and again that is despicable but in some sense honest and useful.

So, the question is not whether you believe crazy anti-American Marxist Freddie deBoer on his take in Iran. The question is, do you see any reason not to trust the Trump administration as they signal over and over again that they’re going to ensure they get the government they want in Tehran, mere weeks after they already changed the leadership of Venezuela without the slightest fig leaf of democracy or self-determination involved?

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Things change slowly, and then all at once. No Child Left Behind was one of the biggest policy failures in any area in the history of this country, everyone (including Congressional Republicans who hate teacher unions) acknowledged that, the law was rejected by bipartisan consensus, and now recently neoliberals have been trying to revive its corpse and are retconning history like this. The “accountability” era of ed policy was over, principally because it was a massive failure, and then things changed on a dime. And now we see the same thing with American attitudes towards interventions in foreign conflicts: we experienced abject failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, our citizens fell out of love with the idea of the United States as a swashbuckling and activist defender of “democracy,” and then all of sudden, neoconservatism is hip again. It will go round in circles.

Over on Substack Notes, I have recently been dealing with a type of argument that I would have thought was stone dead, in the 21st century: the idea that to reject the idea of American intervention in a foreign country’s domestic conflict must necessarily amount to support for an established regime and must necessarily constitute rejection of internal protest movements. The logic, such as it is, treats geopolitics as a moral binary in which the only alternatives are endorsement of U.S. power or complicity with tyranny. It assumes that political agency belongs exclusively to Washington, erasing the possibility that people within those countries might oppose both their rulers and foreign domination at the same time. That this crude logic has been revived, apparently by people unembarrassed by their rejection of history and experience, feels like a depressing regression. I thought we were past this. I thought we were past post-9/11 naivete about freedom and justice growing from the impact craters of cruise missiles. I thought anyone who lived through the last quarter-century would understand why “You’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” reasoning is so obviously toxic. But maybe not. Maybe not.

So: you’d like for the United States to install freedom and democracy in Venezuela, Iran, and [checks notes] Greenland! You think freedom spreads from the United States like a fart in a crowded elevator. You don’t want to hear about complications. You don’t want to countenance the possibility that things could go wrong, even with the best intentions, and of course the Trump administration does not have the best intentions. You’re eager to ignore the fact that the parts of the Venezuelan opposition approved of by Washington have always had far more support among Western elites than among Venezuelans; you’ll rationalize the fact that Iran is absolutely stuffed with Mossad and CIA agents who have absolutely no intention of letting the country determine its own next leader. You just want to feel righteous and to beat your chest about freedom and democracy. Can anything perhaps dissuade you? Maybe, just maybe, you might take a look at the current government in Iraq, which the United States established at the cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives, without even getting into the impossibly high costs the Iraqi people paid. This example is… not encouraging.

Let’s start with corruption. After all, one of the major planks of anti-Saddam arguments in the runup to the war was pointing out that he was a very kleptocratic ruler who stole immense amounts of wealth from his people.

Well, I’m afraid the news is not encouraging! Almost 23 years after the American invasion, the current Iraqi government remains mired in systemic corruption that has effectively hollowed out the state’s ability to provide for its citizens. According to Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, Iraq ranks 140th out of 180 countries, with a dismal score of 26/100. An impossible amount of public dollars in Iraq find their ways into the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats and well-connected dynastic families. The endemic level of corruption is intensified, as I understand it, by the muhasasa system, a sectarian power-sharing arrangement that encourages political elites to treat ministries as personal fiefdoms for patronage and embezzlement, a classic example of legalized corruption. An excellent example of the institutional decay is the 2022 “Heist of the Century,” where approximately $2.5 billion was stolen from tax deposit accounts through a network of shell companies and corrupt officials. Despite constant anti-corruption rhetoric from Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s administration, high-level accountability is nonexistent, and the government’s Defense Integrity Index score of 9/100 - yes, 9/100 - suggests that even the most vital national functions are vulnerable to financial exploitation.

To make things worse, the Iraqi government has exhibited increasingly authoritarian tendencies, particularly through using the judiciary and restrictive legislation to stifle dissent. The political landscape has been defined by what’s sometimes called “nonviolent repression,” especially through the tactical use of court rulings to disqualify political opponents and the passage of vague “decency” laws to arrest activists and journalists. This is a kind of 21st century, postmodern authoritarianism: the government creates structures that are formally legal within the system but which are clearly antithetical to real personal liberty and self-governance by the people. Increasingly, the government is cracking down on dissent. Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have documented a disturbing trend of using water cannons and live ammunition against protesters demanding basic services, alongside social repression like the 2024 criminalization of same-sex relations, which can carry sentences of up to 15 years. (Talkin’ bout freedom!) The entire history of post-Saddam Iraqi “democracy” has been a history consolidation of power by a narrow political elite, the hope of reform crushed by a system that cares only about regime survival.

Sure, Iraq’s current government is technically elected. But as Chatham House has demonstrated, these elections are corrupted on a fundamental level through vote buying and forcing soldiers to vote for the current regime. They have elections in Pakistan, too, and yet….

If they Iraq government is going to be authoritarian, at least it’s providing stability and security, right? Sadly, no. The Iraqi state has proven to be notoriously unable to control its own borders, leading to the rise of ISIS, and there's been a relentless terrorism problem within the country. There's also a dangerous lack of central authority, as the state increasingly shares its monopoly on force with militias, most notably the Popular Mobilization Forces. What is the PMF? It’s a militia, within the Iranian sphere of influence and run by unaccountable warlords. The PMF is technically a state-sanctioned entity, but this reflects the fact that the Iraqi government would not have the practical military ability to deny it sanctioned status. (The Iraqi establishment government might very well lose an armed conflict with the militias.) The PMF operates as a “state within a state” - there are rumored to be 230,000 personnel working directly for the operation - and it’s subject to zero democratic input. There are other major militias, and they’ve been implicated in extrajudicial killings and the intimidation of civilians, while the Iraqi military remains fragmented.

It’s easy to decry the rise of the PMF - I am decrying it - but we should also understand it as a perfectly natural outcome in a country that has always had a large Shia majority but was ruled over by a Sunni kleptocracy for a quarter-century. (That was the whole fucking issue in 2003 and the immediate years that followed, remember?) Western imperialist powers had set up this system, in the Middle East, of establishing weak minority governments on majority populations, so that they had more power through keeping those minority governments in power - a Sunni government ruling a Shia population in Iraq, a Christian government ruling a Muslim population in Lebanon, an Alawite government ruling an Arab population in Syria. We are always living with the consequences of those imperialist machinations now. One of those consequences is that Iraqi Shiites, who lived under the thumb of an unelected Sunni Ba’athist government, have a very understandable desire to have an independent Shia force in the country. The mobilization of these groups was initially fueled by a visceral need to ensure that the systemic marginalization of the past could never return. I lament it but I understand it. Were I an Iraqi Shi’ite, yeah, I’d want militias that fight for Shi’ite interests too. But obviously, the impact of these groups is destabilizing and antidemocratic. Iraq has effectively traded a single dictator for many little dictators, and the rule of law is constantly subverted by the rule of the gun. Not great, Bob, not great.

Most Americans don’t even pretend to give a shit about any of this. We briefly started to care when ISIS rose in the lawless borderlands between Iraq and Syria, lawlessness created by two crises that we played a direct role in creating. Well, ISIS specifically has been largely defanged, but the underlying condition of a country with a large population of religious zealots, lots of guns, and areas that are barely controlled by the establishment government is one guaranteed to produce more instability. It is a deeply tragic reality that after the staggering human and financial costs of the war to remove Saddam Hussein, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of coalition soldiers, the nation has transitioned from one form of tyranny to a modern landscape of fragmented autocracy and systemic plunder. The high price paid by the Iraqi people and their neighbors was intended to pave the way for democracy; instead, we’ve got this dark outcome where the state’s resources are cannibalized by the very officials meant to protect them. This is not encouraging when it comes to America’s ability to spread “freedom.”

Of course, we could also look at our twenty-year misadventure in Afghanistan, but I don’t think I even need to make an argument there. We invaded, we established an electoral system that deliberately excluded large swaths of Afghanistan’s sects and powers, the puppet government that emerged from that system was widely regarded as illegitimate within the country, it proved to be ruinously corrupt, and unsurprisingly that government collapsed the moment the American military left the country, leaving Afghanistan right back in the hands of the Taliban, who if anything have a stronger hold on the country than they did before. Of course, you may rush to say that no one is talking about invading Iran. I would say, first, that we didn’t invade Libya either, just decapitated its government, leaving it one of the most brutal and chaotic places on earth, an open-air slave market ruled by squabbling warlords who oppress Libya’s people and have allowed it to become a breeding ground for Islamic terrorism. Second, I would say… no one is talking about invading Iran yet. And if you trust that Donald Trump is so smart and stable that he would never press such a thing, well, I don’t know what to tell you. And as I pointed out before, American “soft” influence in Iran already resulted in a decades-long disaster that directly created the conditions we face now. What will it take for people to recognize that our noble interventions, our selfless fighting for democracy, always end in ruin?

It is so fucking wild to me, how skepticism toward American intervention abroad is still waved off as knee-jerk lefty radicalism, as if the last quarter-century never happened. The recent history of U.S. meddling in the Middle East - wars sold on false premises, states shattered rather than stabilized, millions killed, tens of millions displaced, trillions wasted, resentments deepened for generations - ought to have made caution a baseline, not a fringe posture. Opposing yet another intervention isn’t a matter of ideological purity or reflexive anti-Americanism; it’s the only rational response to a track record of catastrophic unintended consequences that we seem determined to forget.

One of the most important essays I’ve ever read came from Peter Beinart. It details why he had become a particularly aggressive liberal interventionist, calling for war in Iraq, and why he came to regret it. Here is how the essay ends.

It begins with a painful realization about the United States: We can't be the country those Iraqis wanted us to be. We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war. That's why a liberal international order, like a liberal domestic one, restrains the use of force — because it assumes that no nation is governed by angels, including our own. And it's why liberals must be anti-utopian, because the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time.

What will it take, do you think, for people to realize that opposing American intervention in foreign conflicts does not amount to support for regimes involved in those conflicts? And what will it take, do you think, for all of you to admit that American good intentions have led again and again not to the river opening for the righteous, but to rivers of innocent blood?