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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

#251

Post by cess11 »

reducesuffering wrote: post #240
mattnewton wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, the qualifiers are mostly because I am not knowledgeable to say what caused the situation _now_, not because the facts of the US backed coup damaging Iran are at all in dispute.

Not absolutely. > not because the facts of the US backed coup damaging Iran are at all in dispute. I mean, they are, GP just admitted they stand corrected[0] and "democratically elected government" of Mossadegh is factually incorrect. Other comments have pointed out he was installed not by the people, but by the Shah and Majles, stopped 1952 elections when they didn't go his way, then tried to dissolve parliament and…

You're leaving out a lot of detail. Yes, Mossadegh stopped counting votes, claiming the election was corrupted by foreign influence, which it to some extent was. Less than half the members of the majlis that had thus been elected belonged to his own party, so that wasn't exactly a power grab for himself.

In the events that followed his popularity rose and he tried to gather a government but was blocked by the shah, which made him even more popular, to the extent that the armed forces backed off from containing the demonstrations. It's against this background he sent a bill to the majlis that would give him six months of emergency powers to push through with his political program and the nationalisation, which was approved.

After those six months he asked for another twelve months and got it, but his base had started to wither away and allies switched sides because the reforms didn't have enough effect fast enough in the international climate they were in. I.e. trade boycott and foreign influence operations and so on, which of course hurt his constituents. Some of his allies were also afraid that he might turn against them, hence they turned on him.

Churchill convinced Eisenhower that Mossadegh were going to deport the shah, and then they launched the coup.

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

#253

Post by timeon »

renegade-otter wrote: post #9

I am not saying there is no crisis coming, but I recall reading that Tehran will be out of water in two weeks, two months ago. What's up with that?

> two weeks, two months ago

I remember reading about droughts in Syria every year since ~2006. Somehow those news stopped after 5 years. Did they sort it out?

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

#254

Post by mc32 »

cess11 wrote: post #244
mc32 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever happened due to the British, it’s still fact they Iran was doing pretty well before the current revolution. I don’t think anyone would argue the population at large are better off today than they were under the previous regime.

That's a matter of values. Some would argue that appeasement of and being subdued by colonial powers is a much to high price to pay for whatever material wealth you're referring to.

That’s an ideological issue. Many people if they could would move to one of such ‘imperial powers’ which means it’s not much of an actual issue.

Most Europeans seem to be fine being under the EU where they don’t get to vote those bureaucrats in.

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

#255

Post by adolph »

cornholio wrote: post #175

> In Iran, some 90 percent of the water abstracted from rivers and underground aquifers is taken for agriculture. It's quite something they are envisioning a 100 billion dollar project to move the capital instead of limiting water waste in desert agriculture and closing Tehran's water loop by reclaiming sewage, greatly reducing the net demand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhCNpX3s-D8

Closed loop municipal water systems seem like such a good idea that just needs a little kickstart to become relatively self-sustaining from harvesting what is otherwise treated as waste.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S194439862...

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

#256

Post by cess11 »

mc32 wrote: post #254
cess11 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a matter of values. Some would argue that appeasement of and being subdued by colonial powers is a much to high price to pay for whatever material wealth you're referring to.

That’s an ideological issue. Many people if they could would move to one of such ‘imperial powers’ which means it’s not much of an actual issue. Most Europeans seem to be fine being under the EU where they don’t get to vote those bureaucrats in.

US influence in Europe would be a much better comparison than indirection between positions and elections in the EU. As you surely know we've had a lot of interference in what parties are allowed and who can get elected and financing of organised crime coming from that direction.

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

#257

Post by renewiltord »

It is good that there are lessons like this in other lands. Their millions will thirst so that we can see what not to do.

Rural Californians put up signs that say we’re “wasting most of the water in the river” by which they mean our policy of allowing the river to flow into the ocean.

We should look to places with less intelligent geoengineering to see what would happen if we were so foolish. Their combination of resourcefulness and low-IQ will show us what happens when we prioritize extraction alone.

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

#258

Post by coredog64 »

therobots927 wrote: post #204
ch4s3 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kind of like how the US built Phoenix and LA in the middle of the desert, and allows farming in the desert as well, setting the stage for a near term water crisis in the region when the Rocky Mountain snow melt gets cut in half?

The Salt River enabled the Phoenix area to be an agricultural power house long before Columbus arrived in America. The Pima practiced irrigation agriculture and were using their crop surpluses to trade far and wide.

What's problematic is Phoenix agriculture is the focus on extremely water hungry crops like alfalfa and not really the presence of agriculture in general.

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

#259

Post by ch4s3 »

therobots927 wrote: post #234
ch4s3 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mossadegh was elected but was also illegally trying to dissolve parliament. >at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a riv…

Fair enough, it seems like you know a lot more about this than I do. I’ll read the link you sent

I think it’s just a super complicated story. My post above doesn’t even touch the rural urban divide or the role of the Mullahs or Tudeh and the communists. The whole thing was a second from exploding for years.

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

#260

Post by ch4s3 »

cess11 wrote: post #243
adventured wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ac…

He was as democratically elected as the system at the time allowed and spent basically his entire political career on increasing the power of the majlis and getting rid of colonial interests. The UK spent a lot of resources conspiring against this project, which ultimately failed, to a large extent because he did not have a solution to the blockade that followed nationalisation of the oil production. Perhaps he also…

> increasing the power of the majlis

Right up until he was about to lose an election, then he suspended counting votes and tried to dissolve the Majlis in alliance with the communist party.

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