Comment by ifwinterco
4 days ago
Not puppets of the monarchy per se but at least some of them may be puppets of foreign actors who are backing the monarchy.
Honestly very hard to say, I don’t know what to believe about the Iran situation. I think it’s pretty much impossible to get a good understanding of it from a western country
> Honestly very hard to say
It really isn't. Inflation at a fraction of Iran's prompts governments to change in any democracy.
What I mean is two things are true at once:
1) Iran's government has not done a good job of running the country and is therefore genuinely unpopular among a significant percentage of the population.
2) Iran's current government has powerful enemies (US, UK and of course a country in the Middle East all really hate the Iranian regime) and those enemies are actively trying to destabilise it.
So it's really hard from the perspective of being in a western country to work out how much of the protests are genuinely endogenous to Iran and how much is an intelligence operation, because it's clearly not 0%
> it's really hard from the perspective of being in a western country to work out how much of the protests are genuinely endogenous to Iran and how much is an intelligence operation, because it's clearly not 0%
Intelligence assets are generally covert. It's incredibly difficult to engineer a protest–particularly in a repressive regime–out of nothing. Like half of the CIA's history in the Cold War was trying and failing to do this.
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