US 'Protests' in Iran: Whose Interests Are We Protecting?
The Independent 's headline, 'Tehran says ‘we are ready for war’ after Trump threatens military action,' positions Iran's response as aggressive, rather than defensive. This comes after years of US sanctions crippling the Iranian economy and documented attempts at internal destabilization. This very playbook was deployed in Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 80s, and most recently, Syria and Libya.
It conveniently ignores the CIA's 1953 coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, installing a Western-backed dictator. Are these 'protests' organic calls for freedom, or are they, at least in part, echoing sentiments nurtured by decades of foreign meddling? It's fascinating how Washington and its media proxies suddenly discover 'human rights' in countries
targeted for regime change, while conveniently overlooking similar or worse crackdowns by their allies. How many 'brutal crackdowns' has Saudi Arabia engaged in without a whisper of US military intervention? Perhaps only crackdowns by nations without significant oil reserves (or those resisting US hegemony) warrant such stern warnings. The threat of war, couched in humanitarian concerns, sounds
eerily familiar to previous interventions that left entire regions in ruins. One might wonder whose 'freedom'—or whose geopolitical interests—are truly at stake.