[afarrell]

Because

1. Any political movement will attract people who are hungry for power-for-power’s-sake or to inflate their own ego. Naiveté about this is malpractice in the same way that US naïveté about Chalabi was malpractice.

Iranians who are naive to the point of self-deception will be as misleading as those who are willfully deceptive. Discernment without undue cynicism is necessary but hard.

From the perspective of the US/UK, Iran and Iraq are pretty culturally similar. They are strangers to us. Lets not pretend to be more anthropologically/politically knowledgeable than we are.

2. We don’t have access to reliable intelligence. It is wise to be humble about our ability to sort fact from myth from falsehood.

3. If we want this to succeed, then we want marginal (in the sense of “swing voters”) and civic-minded Iranians to switch to supporting this. Those Iranians will have “CIA-backed coup” as a historical memory so it is worth empathizing with them.