Geographically speaking, over 80% of Iran’s land is classified as arid or semi-arid, and it is likely to face over 5°C of warming by the end of the century: the impacts of climate change will likely be more severe in Iran than the regional average. The region suffers from extreme weather including both droughts and flooding, seismic activity in the form tectonic uplift, particularly near the Makran coast, and constant attacks: economic attack by sanction, cyber attack on energy infrastructure, and lately even kinetic attack from neighbors. The fact that the regime hasn’t collapsed is a testament to Persian, Iranian and Islamic culture, and I hope its people find ways to prosper when the deck is so stacked against them.
Iran isn’t a breadbasket exactly, but it has more arable land per person than Germany, Italy, the UK, or Ireland. And vastly more than Japan. It’s relatively temperate now—future warming doesn’t explain its current situation. On top of all that, it has oil! In 1980, just after the revolution, Iran had a PPP GDP per capita above Taiwan, China, and South Korea. And only modestly behind Poland. Today those countries are far ahead. Same for Thailand, Malaysia, and Turkey.
The economic sanctions are a symptom not the cause.
It's nominal GDP per capita was above Taiwan, Turkiye, South Korea, and all of Eastern Europe.
If the stuff that happened to Iran in our timeline didn't happened in the 1980s-2000s, it probably could have seen an economic boom comparable to what SK and Taiwan saw in the 1990s - especially becuase the leadership in 1980s South Korea and Taiwan were equally as authoritarian as that in Iran back then.
Other similar losers from that era were the DRC, Syria (before the civil war it was roughly on par with Turkiye), the Ivory Coast (it was France's premier financial hub in Franafrique before the civil war), and Pakistan (it's GDP per capita was significantly above China's until the 1990s, and Pakistani advisors helped industrialize significant portions of the Gulf).
This is a disgusting comment. There exists no parallel here. The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible. You are saying that this is somehow equivalent to Israel simply existing. Iran became hostile to Israel and to the US in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution.
Also, the US entered WWII because of Pearl Harbor, and engaged in a normal war against the Axis. Iran engages in terrorism by financing and arming terrorist groups that perform terrorist attacks on civilians. The US action in WWII defeated the nazis. The actions of the Iranian dictatorship caused deaths and terrors targeted at civilians in other countries and destroyed the lives of its own people in Iran.
The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible, with a total of 6 million Jewish people murdered. They prioritized the killing of Jewish people, sometimes even over war objectives (as evidenced by letters where trains were used to facilitate the murder of Jewish people instead of transporting war supplies). Do you think Israel engaged in this kind of campaign to kill as many people as possible of any ethnicity?
The Gaza population has been increasing and almost doubled since Israel ceded the territory in 2005. Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties when hitting valid military targets. Israel announces beforehand where targets will be hit, even though this obviously gives advantages to the enemy. Israel even just cancels their attacks if the civilian casualties would be too high. The ratio of civilians-by-combatants casualties in the Gaza war has been much lower than other wars in the urban environment.
I don't know what kind of rock one must be hiding under to not think that Israel was not trying to exterminate as many Palestinians as possible in the current genocide. It's all very well documented and indeed livestreamed. All levels of their society were calling for as much killing as could be done.
No amount low effort lawyering is going to erase cabinet ministers calling for ethnic cleansing, the use of food as a weapon, the rape of detainees, the celebration of the rapists, the double tap shooting of children by their hundreds, the killing fields of the fake GHF aid sites, the mass executions of medics and aid workers, the systematic destruction of water, health and education infrastructure....and on and on and on.
It is bizarre how you can be at the same time so arrogant and so wrong. If Israel were trying to "exterminate as many Palestinians as possible", Israel would simply perform semi-indiscriminate bombings in the wake of October 7th. This would kill many more Palestinians and would spend much less geopolitical capital. Instead, Israel spent two years performing a very targeted military campaign against Hamas. This resulted in many FEWER civilian casualties (in fact, it had a much LOWER rate of civilians-by-combatants casualties than average urban wars).
> They prioritized the killing of Jewish people, sometimes even over war objectives [...]
> Do you think Israel engaged in this kind of campaign to kill as many people as possible of any ethnicity?
Yes. There are political constraints on the amount they can kill per day without drawing too much pressure from their backers USA and Europe. They spent a lot of time finding the horrible sweet spot that allows western politicians to largely ignore constant, neverending, Palestinian deaths, allowing the killing to never stop.
This weird so-called ceasefire (Israel has continued to kill and assassinate Palestinians despite it, about 150 have been killed) that is going on right now seems more like something that Trump insisted on and Israel was forced into accepting, but is doing their best to end.
Oh and, I replied to your naive talking points for the benefit of a bystander who might be reading and still be swayed by that after 2 years of a live-streamed genocide. I do not intend to reply any further, as the discussion on all these things has been largely settled, as evidenced by Israel's shattered reputation among basically everyone under the age of 40 in even USA.
> > The Nazis prioritized the killing of Jewish people, sometimes even over war objectives [...]
> > Do you think Israel engaged in this kind of campaign to kill as many people as possible of any ethnicity?
> Yes.
You just said Israel engaged in campaigns of trying to kill as many Gazans as possible just like the Nazis did with Jewish people. Do you have any evidence at all of this? We live in the most information-rich era in history. Do you have an evidence AT ALL for this? Again, not a military campaign with military objectives that accepts more civilian casualties than what you'd like, but a systematic campaign with the OBJECTIVE of killing as many Gazans as possible?
I completely agree with you. We who wish well on Iranians can only hope the situation is speedily rectified and the regime will finally fall, ending the oppression, want, war and poverty they have inflicted on so many millions of people both within and without their borders.
Almost everything you’ve described, except for natural disasters, is an own goal. There’s literally no need for the country to be poor and on the brink of collapse. They are doing it to themselves.
