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After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

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Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#191

Post by pphysch »

wonderwonder wrote: post #182
some_random wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you see the instant a western power interferes with a region, all agency is immediately stripped from every single person there. It's really sad, they all become puppets or automatons reacting purely to external stimulus.

Worst part is the agency never returns. Anything that goes wrong for the next 500 years is due to that original western intereference. Tragic really.

The West hasn't stopped interfering in Iran though. They did massive terrorist attacks there just a year ago. Israel would openly salivate at the prospect of destroying Iranian agriculture and water supply.

China is an interesting counterfactual. Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#192

Post by therobots927 »

ch4s3 wrote: post #188
hvb2 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of countries messing around in that region is long.... From the US, Russia and china to local powers like Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran themselves. Either you're a scholar studying the region, if not your comment feels naive at best

Ultimately comments like this deny the agency of people who actually make decisions in these countries.

When a country with vastly superior resources intervenes in the affairs of a country with less, then it tips the scales in an unnatural way. Do they depend on greedy, self interested members of Iranian society to succeed? Of course. But that doesn’t excuse western behavior at all.

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#193

Post by therobots927 »

mattnewton wrote: post #165
hersko wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think Iran's situation is also mostly its own doing?

I personally am not well read on this, but I know lot of people blame the US and the UK since after they overthrew the democratically elected socialist government and installed a brutal dictator[0], the only elements that survived to oppose the dictatorship were hardened islamists, who later took power from the US backed Shah[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat [1] https://en.wikipedia.…

This is basic, commonly accepted history. That’s why all of the comments defending US actions deflect and blame the accomplices within Iran like the Shah.

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#194

Post by ch4s3 »

therobots927 wrote: post #192
ch4s3 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately comments like this deny the agency of people who actually make decisions in these countries.

When a country with vastly superior resources intervenes in the affairs of a country with less, then it tips the scales in an unnatural way. Do they depend on greedy, self interested members of Iranian society to succeed? Of course. But that doesn’t excuse western behavior at all.

My point is that western behavior has really nothing to do with Iran going on a foolish dam building spree, or over pumping in a foolish attempt to grow water hungry crops in arid mountain plateaus.

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#195

Post by parineum »

ForHackernews wrote: post #22
mrits wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American "regime" has a country that people are literally fighting in line to get into.

Not any more. https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/08/icymi-negative-n...

That's not the "Gotcha' you think it is.

Net immigration is down. That counts illegal immigration and deportations, presumably which are way down and way up, respectively. Both stats have nothing to do with how many people _want_ to be in the US, just how many people are able to get here.

How long is the of _applicants_ for residency in the US? That's the metric you're looking for. I suspect, with the increased difficulty in illegal immigration, that there is an increase in applications for legal immigration. That's speculation though, I have no idea where to get those numbers.

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#196

Post by vintermann »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #166
vintermann wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence You say that if it was some cultural oddity, and not a completely understandable reaction and exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation.

> exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation Until like a couple years ago, autarky was generally not in the Western playbook. It’s a stupid idea that tends to be embraced by stupid people. The only ones who have done it sustainably are the Kims, as a nuclear monarchy over a totalitarian state.

They have not been in the same situation, and that is sufficient explanation. No cultural geists need to be posited.

The point of autarky isn't that you want to isolate yourself from the world, but that because you credibly could, you're in a much stronger negotiating position in all those mutually beneficial deals you would like to make.

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#197

Post by Der_Einzige »

smugma wrote: post #167
hersko wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think Iran's situation is also mostly its own doing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%2527%C3%A9... A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mossadegh nationalized and refused to concede to western oil demands.

Nationalizing resources simply gives the capitalist west a legitimate casus beli to “liberate” all the assets that were stolen.

Venezuela is about to be turned into another Vietnam. Iran is next. I remember invading them in a mission in BF3. The USA itches to implement what its media anticipated.

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#198

Post by Someone »

wat10000 wrote: post #140
Someone wrote: post #12

> However, unpublished national observations revealed groundwater depletion in some plains from as early as the 1950s. This coincided with the gradual replacement of Persian qanats, which were sustainable groundwater extraction systems and UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites9, with (semi)deep wells. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira... says Iran’s population today is over five times that o…

Clicking through the link to the original paper, the point seems to be that qanats are inherently sustainable because they only produce as much as goes in. You may gradually exceed their capacity, but there won’t be a sudden “oops, no more water” crisis as can happen when you pump an aquifer dry.

Yes, they do, but if what goes in is insufficient by a wide margin, people who can afford to will start drilling for water.

Assuming that the water taken through qanats would eventually make it into aquifers (fat from unlikely, I think, as it takes water from underground that’s less likely to evaporate) one could even argue that tapping rainwater with qanats prevent aquifers from getting refilled, so it’s taking from the same water source.

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#199

Post by adventured »

therobots927 wrote: post #189
ch4s3 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sort of a bad and inaccurate summary of a much more complicated situation. Mossadegh was trying to dissolve parliament and was in conflict with the Shah before the British got involved. The Shah was already planning to try by constitutional means (which he had legal power to do) to remove Mossadegh. Would he have done it without British and US backing, is a debate for historians.

I don’t think any serious post WWII historians would agree with you. There was a concentrated effort by the UK and US to displace Mossadegh, who was democratically elected by the way. At the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems when it’s been proven that the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet were actively destabilizing their societ…

> who was democratically elected by the way

He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.

For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.

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