Re:Coups, lies, dirty tricks: Stewart Copeland on his CIA ag...
by bryanrasmussen on Thursday August 06, 2020 @01:37PM
(#24073348)
I didn't fault them for not having a revolution expediently, I just think that with a 25 year divide there are thousands of ways things might have played out, there might have been a later revolution, another type of revolution (for example a friend of mine was a communist during the Iranian revolution and for a short time it looked like his side was in good position, but then Khomeini), not taking hostages etc. etc. therefore the revolution that came to pass was not a direct consequence, even if it was directly related.
The Anglo-American legal tradition has two notions of causation: "but-for" and "proximate". The latter asks whether a consequence was foreseeable, and in practice amounts to a judgement about moral culpability for the consequence.
The establishment of an autocratic state was a foreseeable consequence of CIA intervention, and it doesn't seem fair to fault Iranians for failing to subdue their autocrats in a single generation. Such things take time.