Here's an in-depth academic analysis of this:
https://stratcomcoe.org/publications/hybrid-threats-hamas-use-of-human-shields-in-gaza/87
Not that you care, given the ridiculous lie you just spread.
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China’s economic growth
How much of this is growth comes from construction? How can we know we can trust the numbers out of China?
The Iraq invasion lead to over a million Iraqi refugees fleeing to Syria
Irrelevant. The kids Assad had tortured belonged to important Syrian families, not any refugees in the country.
the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel (triggered by Israel’s illegal occupation of Lebanese territory that only the US recognizes)
Also irrelevant for the same reason and this land is only occupied, because it was used by Syrian forces for artillery shelling of Israel during the Six Days war. While the occupation isn't widely recognized, I really see no point in portraying it as a bad thing. Israel was attacked, they took a piece of land away from the enemy that would have made future attacks easier. Hardly an evil plot anyone needs to lose sleep over, other than Syria and Israel.
Not to mention, the 2006 war wasn't a war between Lebanon and Israel, it was one between Hezbollah and Israel - and certainly not one over the Golan Heights, which the terrorist group couldn't care less about.
utterly destroying Libya and turning it from the most prosperous African country to one that has open slave auctions
Libya saw an uprising that was supported by a Western coalition based on a UN resolution. Blaming America for the ensuing chaos makes no sense. It was morally the right choice to support the rebels.
Yemen too, now
Why blame America when Iran is responsible? Iran-backed and -directed Houthis fired first, including at American ships (but anything that floats in these waters). Again, it makes no sense to blame America for shooting back here, especially since everyone else, except for the UK, is either unwilling or unable (like China) to do so.
Back to Syria:
Did America pour grease on the fire once it started? Obviously, it literally backed the opposition groups and inflamed the civil war!
I don't think you are aware of this, but in a single prison, Assad has had about as many people murdered as died in the entire war in Gaza so far:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SednayaPrison
Are you really blaming America for supporting groups that fight against such a monster?
There were almost 20,000 air strikes!
Let me do some whataboutism for a change: There were 45,000 Russian air strikes until 2019 alone, which, unlike American air strikes, primarily targeted civilians:
https://airwars.org/conflict/russian-military-in-syria/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RussianinterventionintheSyriancivilwar#Civiliancasualtiesandwarcrimes
And did US intervention in Syria help? Or did it make everything worse? I think we both know the answer.
No, I don't think we can agree on this either. There are now parts of Syria with democracy and human rights:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutonomousAdministrationofNorthandEastSyria
Why are you blaming Syria on America, even though it was internal unrest sparked by the Syrian government torturing a bunch of kids for anti-Assad graffiti? This resulted in increasingly larger protests, which were crushed with incredible violence by the regime, which in turn led to mass defections from the Syrian army as more and more soldiers were unwilling to kill their fellow citizens, creating factions that fought both against the Syrian government and among each other.
America caused none of this. In fact, it's the Syrian government that claimed foreign agents were responsible for the initial protests. It's not a good look to repeat this obvious and transparent lie.
Fine construction? Based on what? Have you actually seen these ghost cities? There is nothing fine about them.
I don't think you quite understand that in this case, it's millions upon millions of working and middle class people who put most of their life's savings into this.
Power, opportunism, thirst for war, corruption (not oil though). Plenty of reasons for this war.
Your logic has a flaw though: It's not like Saddam would have just stopped doing his thing in 2003 had he not been removed from power. The country was a powder keg anyway, so perhaps it would have ended up just like Syria eventually (I can't imagine the Arab Spring leaving it alone) - or perhaps we would have seen another war between it and Iran. Another possibility would have been Iraq attacking a neighbor other than Iran again, perhaps at a time when they weren't expecting a harsh American response (e.g. under a Democratic US presidency).
None of this excuses that Bush and Blair made up reasons to invade the country nor the incompetent handling of it afterwards that led to most of the up to one million dead post-Saddam, but let's not pretend that everything would have been rosy had the second Gulf War not happened.
The upper estimates for the number of people killed under Saddam Hussein are about one million as well. Now what?
Iraq was better off before the invasion. Fact.
I don't think this is a fact. Let's look at a few metrics, starting with HDI:
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Iraq/humandevelopment/
Infant mortality rate:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRQ/iraq/infant-mortality-rate
GDP per capita (ignore the silly outlier):
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRQ/iraq/gdp-per-capita
These basic figures suggest that a number of key aspects of life are indeed better than they were during the dictatorship.
The homicide rate is higher now:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRQ/iraq/murder-homicide-rate
Keep in mind though that there is no way of knowing how accurate official figures from the past were (this also goes for the numbers on human and economic development, of course). Also worth noting that the government itself could kill and maim with impunity back then:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde14/003/1996/en/
Freedom of the press is still pretty abysmal these days (and the page also touches on what you were likely mentioning the instability):
https://rsf.org/en/country/iraq
A report from 2002 on the state of affairs under Saddam's rule:
https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq/press.html
I would admit that life in Iraq could be safer under Saddam Hussein compared to today, given that he kept a lid on especially religious conflicts, but this came with a big asterisk: Provided you didn't run afoul of the regime or provided the regime didn't think you did (no court of appeal, no independent judiciary, torture and murder are common - you can be the most loyal Baathist and still just be unlucky), provided you didn't have a pretty daughter (or were one) in a place where Saddam's son were looking for girls to rape, torture and murder, provided you weren't a member of a persecuted ethnic group, provided you didn't own something Saddam or his sons wanted from you, etc. The usual caveats of living under autocratic rule, with the added "insane son of dictator" factor (see also: what Kim Jong Il was up to in his younger days).
I looked for Ethiopian or African news sites that confirm this story, but it seems like it's not accurate. This African green news site only mentions that ICE cars will be phased out in line with the EU by 2035 and that the government encourages the sale of electric cars through incentives and local assembly:
https://www.afrik21.africa/en/ethiopia-non-electric-vehicles-soon-to-be-banned-from-importation/
There is nothing on this on any large Ethiopian news site. The Reporter has no article on this:
https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/?s=electric+cars
Neither does The Ethiopian Monitor:
https://ethiopianmonitor.com/?s=electric+cars
This Senegalese outlet states that it's not clear when the ban comes into effect:
https://apanews.net/ethiopia-to-ban-importation-of-non-electric-cars/
Given that there are significant issues with maintaining and insuring existing electric cars in the country, it's safe to assume that the ban will not happen immediately:
https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/30035/
There is a different car import ban since October of last year aimed at returning citizens, which doesn't appear to have anything to do with the move to electric vehicles though:
https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/36044/
So in other words, this awful article containing a chat log for some reason (What on Earth was the author thinking with that?) is just an example of poor reporting.
Sure, but China suffers from enormous environmental cost as well (cement is ridiculously terrible for the environment; now think about what drives most of their paper growth), under an inherently unstable hybrid between market capitalism and state economy, coupled with what can only be described as a demographic WMD, an erratic leadership that, through purges after purges after purges, is busy erasing even the pretense that it's operating under technocratic principles - and on top of that, you get these heave-handed attempts at information control. The latter in particular has never ever worked at making people forget that the economy is on a downwards trajectory with absolutely no sign of even slowing down, let alone a solution that doesn't involve launching a major war in Asia in the hopes that rallying around the flag will somehow prevent the whole house of cards the CCP has been busy building over the last couple of decades from crashing down.
Xi inherited many of the issues China is suffering from, but he also inherited a nation that was slowly opening itself and reversed that course almost from day one. Instead of realizing the untapped potential the emerging Chinese civil society had, he only saw it as a threat and clamped down on it through positively Maoist measures. He has also done everything in his power to make the economic situation worse, all in the name of securing his rule and that of his party (in that order). Xi's answer to economic woes and the demographic decline is mass slavery, which I feel the world will finally stop accepting the moment China oversteps its bounds towards the outside. A war against Taiwan would do it, but I feel like even a major escalation in their (at this point) ten dash line imperialism, perhaps against Japan, could be enough to trigger substantial backlash.
How doubleplusungood.
The problem is that those ghost cities aren't actual cities. The housing is largely worthless and uninhabitable, crumbling before it's even finished, often only "finished" to look that way from afar. You can't actually do anything with it other than tear it down.
Sure, let's roll with that, but why did you argue this? What's the point?
Let's say all of these "developing" aspects equate the US to Iran - even though none of them are even close, which is why you had to use that crutch of using the word developing, implying there is a clear development in one direction, even though it's far more complex than that: So what?
It's still just whataboutism, still an intentional or unintentional attempt at normalizing a rogue state. Like I said, none of this gives Iran the right to behave in the way it does. You could easily use that same logic to excuse what North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Belarus, Vietnam, China are are doing, but that's all this argument does, it's not productive; there is nothing of substance coming out of it. Hell, the user I initially replied to even argued that because America is bad, it should leave Iran alone, which makes zero sense. We can list the faults and issues America has all day and I have been more than critical of the many issues the sole remaining world power has, but at the end of that day, this changes nothing about the asymmetric warfare Iran is conducting based on the same nihilistic zero-sum principle that Russia is using. This is the last thing we should encourage, as everyone gets hurt by it, not just the long list of nations and individuals affected by it, but also ordinary Iranians.
Any charge you level against Iran is 10 times applicable to the US and its allies.
Let's go through the list:
- Autocratic theocracy: There is no Western autocratic theocracy. The closest equivalent ally would be Saudi Arabia, which I would be the last person to defend nor want as an ally.
- Tortures and murders their own population: Again, only Saudi Arabia. As awful at it is, Iran still executes many times more people than even the Saudis.
- Supporting and directing terrorists: Nope. You can point at CIA actions from the past, but if we go back in time, Iran is going to look even worse by comparison.
- Selling arms to Russia: When Russia looked like it was opening up to the West, the West was trading with it, including arms. Can't see how this is comparable to the situation now.
- Hurting trade: Obviously not a thing the West is interested in. The free flow of goods is one of the hallmarks of the Western world.
- Conducting information warfare: RFA and similar Cold War era efforts that are somehow still holding out are almost quaint compared to the massive troll farms countries like Iran are doing.
So no, your attempt at whataboutism, which you tried even though I said no matter what the USA has done, none of it justifies Iran being a menace, falls flat on its face.
The evil deeds of the west have largely given us the problems we have in the middle east today.
Colonialism has created many of the issues this region has today, yes, and the second Gulf War - which I protested in the streets against, by the way - is a more recent example of detrimental Western involvement, as is the installation of the Shah in Iran a few decades earlier. However, blaming most or all of the issues the Middle East has on Western powers is in a way infantilizing, robbing the people and their governments in this region of their agency, which they clearly have and which was clearly the main force since the 1940s that shaped this part of the world. You cannot understate the massive impact the pan-Arabic movement had for example - or more recently, the Arab Spring.
Can you explain to me the differences between Saudi Arabia and Iran, that makes the former a friend and ally to the US, deserving of our high tech weaponry and political support on the world stage, while the other is a villain deserving of annihilation?
Saudi Arabia managed, through intense diplomatic efforts since WW2, to enamor itself with the West. They offered two things: Oil and a strategic partnership. The West was willing to overlook that it's an autocratic hellhole, Saudi Arabia was willing to pinch their noses whenever said West dared to make the most benign attempts at encouraging a more open and tolerant society. There is no denying however that patience is running out just as much as oil is, but since Saudi Arabia is a more than willing counterweight to Iran, which fundamentally threatens it through centuries-old religious animosity and its entirely different style of autocratic governance.
Iran set itself up, through their own will, as an opponent of the West. The Islamic Revolution was not just a revolution against the Western-backed Shah, but also one against the West and its ideals itself. Saudi Arabia isn't a fan of Western ideals either, but it managed to toe the line just well enough to never anger it to the point that the economic and military alliance was endangered. Iran could have easily played the same game, but decided to stubbornly and arrogantly push against a foe that is ultimately far more powerful and could, if enough political will accumulated, annihilate it - never the other way around though, which is why Iran is still trying to get its nuclear weapons program off the ground, as both a deterrent and a potential first strike weapon.
Iran isn’t worse than the US or its allies
It is. Just going by the aforementioned number of executions, it is.
it just stands in the way of US interests. Those interests which, by the way, are not the fairytales called “democracy” or “human rights”
Don't put words in my mouth. The most important value to the West after ensuring its own security and that of its allies is the free flow of goods and people. Iran endangers both. They are endangering the close ally Israel through Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, they are endangering the far less close, but still important ally Saudi Arabia and they are hurting global trade, which impacts everyone, even you. A nation like Iran can only push so many buttons before something happens in response. This bombing campaign is a warning. It tells them both that America knows exactly what its gaggle of proxies are up to and where they are and it's an unspoken warning that these precise strikes hitting those plausibly deniable groups could just as easily hit official Iranian assets, which would hurt far more.
Why should an autocratic theocracy that tortures and murders their own population and is supporting and directing terrorists like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, that is selling arms to Russia, that is hurting trade, conducting information warfare against the West and so on and so forth not be allowed to do all of these things? Really?
Do you really think just because the USA has done terrible things this gives Iran the right to be a menace? What kind of logic is that? Iran is an obvious threat and the rest of the world, including the US and no matter what the US has done, has a right to respond to this threat. The idea that just because Iran is a big bully in the Middle East they have an inherent right to behave in this manner is absurd. It's the same kind of logic that China uses whenever it tries to strongarm its neighbors and receives deserved pushback.
What conspiracy do you think I’m subscribing to?
You are spreading the conspiracy theory that there is a concerted effort from the USA to manufacture consent for a war, whereas in reality, the opposite is the case. This isn't a war and there is absolutely zero indication that one is being prepared for. What Iranian proxies are experiencing right now is nothing but a reality check, a message to them and their masters in Tehran that they have overstepped their bounds. Remember that this attack on American soldiers has been just the latest in a long string of attacks. If America didn't respond to their soldiers getting killed - which were there not as an occupying force, but with full consent of the host country Jordan, which has been a close American ally for many decades - then this would message to regimes like Iran and their affiliated groups that it's fine to kill Americans, that nothing of significance would happen in return. This can obviously not be allowed to happen.
Not everything is a conspiracy. The Iranian government has been aggressive, both inwards and towards other countries, for many years and they finally managed to go that one step too far. It's unsurprising that there is increased interest in the internal affairs of this country and that human rights activists like this one are being listened to more at the moment.
Why are you hoping that they don't? Given the shenanigans the Iranian navy has been up to, promoting much of it to submersible status would be a good thing.
Nothing Israel has done justifies October 7.