Tag Archives: Iranian Regime

Iran’s President Rouhani Could Be Mikhail Gorbachev

This video may not strike you as very serious. But seriousness is the whole point. We use Iran to justify a lot of bad behavior. Just a week or so back, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that we’re going to indefinitely hold territory in Syria because we don’t like the fact that Iran has influence in a country it has had influence in for decades. We use the “seriousness” of the Iranian threat to ourselves and Israel to justify stuff. This doesn’t mean we’re actually serious about the Iranian threat.

Because if we were serious about countering Iran, we’d be using every possible opening. We’d have the ability to both deal with them diplomatically, and oppose them militarily in proxy wars, just like the Cold Warriors of Yore. But we don’t. Because nothing about US foreign policy is serious. Other than its consequences for the world. This video is a thought experiment, asking how we’d tread Iran’s president Rouhani if we were truly serious about countering threats from Iran.

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Video Transcript after the jump…

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Why The Iran Protests Are Confusing | MIC 14

The past week’s developments in Iran are tremendously exciting. Diverse and unexpected elements of the Iranian public have started taking to the streets to protest the regime that has failed them for most of the past 40 years. After a few days of very little press coverage in the United States, we now have a torrent of commentary. But it all strikes me as missing something. US coverage of Iran is limited by the way that US media sees Iran. With this video I delve into the problem…

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Video Transcript after the jump…

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Politico Is Full Of It

Occasionally I will come across a “news” article that is so mind-numbingly bad that I have to address it. “Trump Allies Push White House To Consider Regime Change In Iran” Published in Politico two days ago, was bad enough that I decided to do a full conversation on the topic. I don’t want to call out the individual author. But I do want to call out the mind-set. This article, which is mostly given over to uncritically reproducing the comments of hyper-hawkish think tanks and politicians, is typical. This is the way most of our mainstream news outlets see the world. That’s a tragedy. And practically speaking, it will not serve us well a few decades from now, when we are no longer the only country with any real power.

Jon Coumes of Safe For Democracy was kind enough to come on and discuss this terrible article with me…

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