this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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Edit: as short as 4 months ago, the user above was referring to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians as "the Israel-Palestine conflict". They have posts complaining about leftism on Lemmy, praising the Cybertrucks and Teslas, and edgelording AI. Also, their posting and commenting hours suggest timezones in the continent of America, contrary to their claim of being Iraqi.
The main problem in Iran and the reason why protests broke out last months is simply US + EU sanctions. The Iranian currency imploded over the past months and drove many people to desperation, the current exchange rate is like 1.5mn to 1USD, and this is unequivocally the fault of the US + EU. However bad their regime, US+EU sanctions murder HALF A MILLION PEOPLE YEARLY in the world, the death burden of these sanctions is astronomically higher than anything you can ascribe to the Iranian government. The literal, EXPLICIT POLICY of sanctions is, and I quote official US documents: "to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government".
Iran could have been a secular socialist democracy as Iranians democratically decided in the previous century under the government of Mosaddeq, but UK+USA conspired to bring the government down and brought back monarchy. The Iranian government is literally the fault of the Anglos. Stop doing atrocity propaganda for the US empire on the fucking verge of an invasion. And there are plenty of Iraqi who wholeheartedly condemn the invasion of Iraq even if it brought down the government of Saddam, because what followed was orders of magnitude worse. An example is Hakim on YouTube.
One of the most pathetic things about Reddit is that whenever an argumentative user is incapable of defending their views on their own merits, they spend a embarrassing amount of time digging through someone else's post history to try to find something attack their character with. It's just such a lazy and desperate thing to do because it demonstrates a shallow confidence in their own beliefs, and it also shows that they value "winning" an argument through fallacious means rather than having discussion where opinions are exchanged. I see you're doing your best keeping that chronically online spirit alive here on Lemmy as well.
So let me get this straight, you spent god knows how long going back months into my account history, and the best you could do was intentionally misrepresent my 3 of my positions and then complain about a single word that I used 4 months ago? Damn, that's pathetic.
If you kept digging a little longer or maybe tried reading a little deeper, you would've find out that I'm an Iraqi who's family lived during Saddam Hussein, the US invasion, and then we migrated to Syria after an Iranian terrorist militia attacked our neighbor's at the dead of night. We stayed in Syria for a few years but things started going downhill there too, so we decided to immigrate to the West, and the US was the first country to accept our applications. This is not the gotcha you think it is.
I'm not going to waste too much time here because you're someone who engages in bad faith, but I just want to point out that this narrative is false. Iranians are not protesting just because of the sanctions, they're protesting government tyranny, corruption, and incompetence. If it really was just the sanction, then explain the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests where the country went into uproar for 2 years after the regime killed a teenage girl for not following their religious dress code or explain their water crises where they're threatening to evacuate their capital due to regime's mismanagement or the 2017 hijab law protests. The sanctions don't magically make the regime more authoritarian and incomptent, they just expose the problems that were already there faster.
You're going to need to source this. I know for a fact that you either made this up or you're intentionally misinterpreting some paper that says something very different. If you can't link the exact source you're referring to and then show specifically which part said this, I'm going to safely assume that this claim has no substance.
Also, I find it really annoying, how you're going out of your way to bootlick a regime that is this evil with some low level fallacy like whataboutism. "However bad their regime" my ass, It's not a competition. Other countries doing other bad things does NOT justify, excuse, or negate the evil things that the Iranian regime has done or is doing. The only reason you would even do something like this is because YOU support the regime. At this point you're not just criticizing the West, you're actively defending the regime. You're directly opposing Iranians who are fighting for their freedom and rights, and you're doing everything in your power to stand with their oppressors.
Everybody acknowledges that the coups of the Democratic government were bad, but guess what? It's not the 1950s anymore. We live in a completely different reality now, and those events do not justify or excuse the islamic regime's atrocities against their neighbors or their own people. Like what is even the though process here? "There was a coup 70 years ago that's bad therefore we should support and let this evil regime slaughter and oppress millions of people", it's an asinine position.
The US invasion destabilized the country, but the thing that made it worse was this very same Iranian regime. Their terrorist proxy militias are directly responsible for corrupting the new government, keeping the country unstable through violence and fear, causing violence by stoking sectarian tensions, and turbo charging minority oppression that led to the rise of ISIS. Like what the hell are we even talking about here? How the hell is ignorant Westerner going to try and lecture me about my own country?
So you're example is a Marxist youtube grifter who carters to a Western audience? If that's your source of information on the country then no wonder why you're out of touch. You need to look things made by Iraqis for Iraqis. Go look up Ahemd Al Basheer. He's an Iraqi personality who's followed by millions of Iraqis and he's commonly called the voice of the Iraqi people. He does a very successful late night styled TV show on youtube and DW called Al Basheer Show. Most of his videos are in Arabic, but he did do a youtube series in English awhile back for an international audience awhile ago, you should go watch that. That should be way more informative than someone like Hakim lmao
Where do you base the number of half a million deaths due to US-EU sanctions on? Because I know the EU uses sanctions, but not (at least explicitly) with the intention of causing wide scale hunger.
The source for the half a million (actually 560k a year) comes from this recent study in The Lancet medical journal. It takes into account 50 years of sanction policy and arrives to that figure of murders, yearly, since 1971.
Good on you for questioning the sources, I love seeing people critical of online figures.
The actual study and not just the short article is https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(25)00189-5/fulltext. However, I don't really find the claim backed that the EU is a major factor in that regard:
Not very familiar with how to read the data, but to me, EU sanctions have no really significant impact on mortality in any of these specifications that would allow to construct a hard causality; there is almost no entry for EU sanctions in table 3 where there's a statistical significance, except for "Child mortality (5–10 years)" in Specifications 3 and 4, where it barely reaches the threshold (p=0.051 and p=0.052); in the latter, the UN sanctions have a MUCH higher correlation.
Not exactly sure how one can come to the conclusion that this is US+EU sanctions when there's such a difference between those when viewed in isolation… that said, a correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, e.g. let's say there's a civil war and the government gets sanctioned, then you do have a correlation between deaths and the sanctions, but it's the former that caused the latter and not the other way around.
That said, I'm not disagreeing that sanctions can't have negative effect on a population, in fact it's the normal people getting hit first because usually the targets of sanctions will make sure it's their citizens suffering and not themselves
Thanks for the source, interesting read. Makes me question sanction more. Haha, well here on Lemmy you can have a conversation when asking clarification, so thank you as well :)
There's also the water issue, and that definitely wasn't because of sanctions; and even if the reason for riots might be due to external factors, it does matter to a population how the leadership responds to it, and the response has been horrible.
Because water problems are famously well managed by which government? I'm a Spaniard, and I can tell you that our glorious European democracy™ has golf fields in Castilla La Mancha, and farmers in the vicinity of the Doñana natural park are draining the groundwaters to the point of destruction of the ecosystem.
Are people in Spain rioting due to the mismanagement of water? No. Would people riot if our currency suffered an enormous devaluation and suddenly we couldn't import basic products? Absolutely.
Perhaps they should.
Yeah because issues are always absolute and there is no nuance.
Yes, water is mismanaged in Europe as well and it will bite us, but we're not currently at Iranian levels where they considered moving the capital because the potable water situation was so bad.
The proposal made little sense all things considered, but this is the level of competence the Iranian leadership showed in that situation.
Have you considered that might have to do with Iranian geography? Like, surely you understand that it rains more in Paris than In Tehran?
Also, if water management is your metric for government success, do you give your allegiance to the Communist Party of China for it's anti-desertification campaign in the Gobi desert?
The problem wasn't only lack of rain, but also a lot of mismanagement that led people without water to riot.
Call me crazy, but I consider "providing your citizens with water" as a core government task; why you bring up the Chinese government with something totally unrelated is beyond me.
"I consider it a government task. Yes, I'm making atrocity propaganda of the Iranian government during a US military buildup in the region just months after the country was bombed by the US. I am very progressive and totally not running Israeli propaganda by doing this"
How many comments do you have about water mismanagement by the Saudi government?
How many comments do you have supporting the Muamar El-Qaddafi government for carrying out one of the biggest civil infrastructure projects of the history of humanity (taking water from the great Nubian aquifer) to provide clean drinking water to its citizens, and how many times have you criticized the western intervention that murdered Qaddafi and left the infrastructure of the water supply crumbling?
Or maybe you don't give two shits about people having access to water in any Muslim majority country, and you just want to find reasons to criticize a government on the brink of being invaded by the US?
You're just building a straw man here, people went to demonstrate because of the water crisis that was also caused by mismanagement (and climate change for that matter); these protests were also answered with violence. My point was that I consider this a core government task, even so much that I don't those that do it because it is the bare minimum.
Up to you to decide if you want to consider the "Great Man-Made River" as a success, it surely did improve water quality, but there's no regeneration of the taken water and most of the water is used for irrigation. It also lead to the effect of ground water level lowering; how it all turns out remains to be seen, and from what I read, experts expect up to 50 years of water supply at the current rate (optimistic ones up to 250), not the 4000 years the Gaddafi government estimated back then.
I just don't like how the posts like the one I answered to imply that this is all the US' doing. They play a really big role in all of this, but the Mullahs are also shitty and some of their domestic issues – which have caused riots because people didn't have access to water – were also caused by their own decisions. It's not only interventionism… both sides can be shitty
Yea that guy reeks like a hasbara.