If you were the leader of a country and you discovered that the United States of America had an official policy of regime change with regard to your government, what would you do? If you knew that the CIA was engaged in a secret plan to overthrow you, possibly through assassination, possibly through a military coup, what would you do? If America was committing economic warfare on you and carrying out acts of sabotage within your borders, what would you do?

I had this conversation about Fidel Castro one night with Armando, then of Daily Kos. While he maintained that Castro was always a son-of-a-bitch that was inclined to create a police state and torture his enemies, I suggested that our efforts to invade his country, to kill him, to cause a coup, and to ruin his economy, might just have had a little bit of a role in his decision making processes. If he couldn’t trust his generals, or his cook, or his barber, or that his country wouldn’t be bombed or invaded, then he had little choice but to take drastic measures to protect himself and his country. Reaching out to the Soviets was one way, creating a brutal internal security service was another way.

Many if not all of the things we did or attempted to do to Castro under Eisenhower and Kennedy’s presidencies are currently being done to Iran. And it is having an effect. Iran is in the midst of a crisis and they are resorting to some serious suppression.

The shift is occurring against the backdrop of an economy so stressed that although Iran is the world’s second-largest oil exporter, it is on the verge of rationing gasoline. At the same time, the nuclear standoff with the West threatens to bring new sanctions.

The hard-line administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, analysts say, faces rising pressure for failing to deliver on promises of greater prosperity from soaring oil revenue.

This next part gets to my point about echoes of Cuba.

[The Iranian government] has been using American support for a change in government as well as a possible military attack as a pretext to hound his opposition and its sympathizers.

Some analysts describe it as a “cultural revolution,” an attempt to roll back the clock to the time of the 1979 revolution, when the newly formed Islamic Republic combined religious zeal and anti-imperialist rhetoric to try to assert itself as a regional leader.

They are sending thugs out into the street to enforce Islamic dress…making hippies drink from jerrycans that the Iranians use to clean their asses. Everytime the U.S. issues another threat against Iran, the government uses it to justify more suppression. The state is, after all, under threat of attack. Anyone can be on the CIA payroll. All dissent is potentially paid for by Americans. No one’s loyalty is beyond suspicion.

I do not mean to imply that this suppression is primarily America’s fault. Iran’s government is truly odious. Their behavior is beyond the pale. Anyone that cares a whit about human rights should be totally appalled.

The country’s police chief boasted that 150,000 people — a number far larger than usual — were detained in the annual spring sweep against any clothing considered not Islamic. More than 30 women’s rights advocates were arrested in one day in March, according to Human Rights Watch, five of whom have since been sentenced to prison terms of up to four years. They were charged with endangering national security for organizing an Internet campaign to collect more than a million signatures supporting the removal of all laws that discriminate against women.

Eight student leaders at Tehran’s Amir Kabir University, the site of one of the few public protests against Mr. Ahmadinejad, disappeared into Evin Prison starting in early May. Student newspapers had published articles suggesting that no humans were infallible, including the Prophet Muhammad and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The nastiness of the Iranian government is beyond question but, lest you think this latest crackdown has no relationship to American actions, look at what the leader had to say on the matter.

Analysts trace the broadening crackdown to a March speech by Ayatollah Khamenei, whose pronouncements carry the weight of law. He warned that no one should damage national unity when the West was waging psychological war on Iran. The country has been under fire, particularly from the United States, which accuses it of trying to develop nuclear weapons and fomenting violence in Iraq.

Why this requires a new campaign to punish long hair and casual dress is a topic for an anthropologist. When pressed, the Iranians push for more Islamic purity, as though that will offer them a Jerry Falwellesque ‘curtain’ of protection. It’s crazy, but then religious fanatics are crazy. What are you gonna do?

You can’t blame this on the Americans:

The same thing, to a far lesser degree, has happened in Venezuela, where Chavez has responded to an attempted U.S. sponsored coup attempt with a tightening of governmental control. Then we turn around and accuse him of being a dictator, despite the fact he is a duly elected president.

We could get into a bit of a chicken and egg argument about these things. Who was a son-of-a-bitch first?

Rather than try to make some definitive determination about the answer to that question I’d rather focus on the predictability of it all. We target an country that is considered non-business friendly. They increase their internal security measures in response. We point to their increasing repression to justify intervention. They crack down some more. Etc.

This would all be fine if the governments in question were unambiguous evil-doers and we were riding to rescue of their people. We could be saving the poor dirty hippies of Tehran. Right?

Forget it. I’m concerned about the human rights of average Iranians. That’s precisely why I don’t want to bomb them. And I think we should really consider whether all our threats aren’t contributing to this deterioration of human rights there.

You know what I would like, not that my opinion matters? I’d like to see the Iranians rise up and kick out the Council of Guardians and disband all these religious police and have real elections and not have to deal with these nutty clerics. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. And, while I don’t think America should support that outcome through covert means, we certainly shouldn’t undermine that outcome through covert means. And that, I fear, is exactly what we are doing.

We’re meddling in other people’s affairs, and we aren’t meddling ‘smart’.

One last point. The Iranian people overwhelmingly want the capacity to enrich uranium. Go ask the professors, the students, the leftists, the pro-westerners, whomever. It’s a matter of national security and national pride. Even if we had that great free election, the resulting government would still be reluctant and perhaps unwilling to forego the pursuit of nuclear technology. Regime change is not going to fix that.