The utility of regimes, the inconvenience of democracy

Every time a glimmer of hope seemed to open up for a less extremist Iran, the United States and its allies did everything possible to prevent it from happening.

Al-Qaeda did not exist in Iraq prior to 2003. There was no ISIS in Syria before 2011. There was no Hezbollah before the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. There was no Hamas in 1967. There were no Taliban before the Deobandi movement, born from colonial India and its scars. The list goes on, but now, two days after the appointment of a “radical hawk” like Mojtaba Khamenei to the position of Supreme Leader of Iran, the question many are asking is: what will the present lead to?

Predicting the future is impossible, but when uncovering the meaning of some decisive moments of the past and present, it is worth starting with an old Yiddish proverb: “A half-truth is a whole lie.” The war launched against Iran by Donald Trump and his allies – without any endorsement from the UN or the US Congress – has nothing to do with peace in the Middle East, nor with rights and democracy. Anyone who thinks otherwise is saying that kind of half-truth, as is clear to anyone who knows history.

Every popular movement in the Middle East that has called for parliamentary democracy since 1876 has been opposed by some of the major Western countries: from Egypt in the time of Ahmad Urabi to Iran under Mohammad Mossadegh, passing through Algeria in 1991 and dozens of other contexts and historical phases.

When........

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