The Propagandistic Power of Hasty Generalizations: How Regime Change Is Often Sold

The logical fallacy of hasty generalization – or the mistake of drawing a conclusion from insufficient evidence – is a potent propagandistic tool wielded by the U.S. political and media establishment in their efforts to sell aggression to the American public, and the apparent push for war with Iran is a case in point. They’ll put out footage of Iranian street protests (or, in one case, a massive Bahraini demonstration passed off as an Iranian protest) or feature testimony from a handful of political dissidents in order to demonstrate that the entire country is yearning for "regime change"; all the people need, supposedly, is a little nudge from our military in order to get the ball rolling. This approach is not unlike what I observed when studying foreign media coverage of the Occupy protests several years ago; one got the impression that Americans were on the brink of a revolution (of course, the apparent objective in this case wasn’t to drum up support for a military intervention in the US, but to simply demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes).

The problem with this way of thinking can be illustrated as follows. Suppose that no more than 1% of the Iranian population were dissatisfied with the political establishment, and only 1% of that aggrieved segment called into some program on Voice of America (a US government-funded news network broadcasting to Farsi speakers around the world). In this hypothetical scenario, there would still be over 8,000 people prepared to air their grievances. Imagine just a fraction of these people calling in one by one to complain about the "regime". Would their collective testimony not give some people the impression that most of the country is prepared to overturn the political system? Yet this would be a fallacious conclusion to draw, given that it involves extrapolating from a tiny portion of the population to the whole country.

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The US, Iran, and the Moral High Ground: On the US Government’s Ties to Terrorist Organizations

The harm a country is willing to inflict on another increases in proportion to the degree to which it perceives itself to be the other’s moral superior. Arguably, whether the harm is justified depends, in part, on the accuracy of this perception. In the specific case of U.S. policy towards Iran, American public support is to some extent explained by the perception that Iran is America’s moral inferior partly on account of its support for reputed terrorist organizations. How accurate is this perception, at least with respect to this particular basis? Here I provide a sample – by no means an exhaustive list – of cases in which the US government supported or cooperated with terrorist organizations. To avoid the charge of pedaling "conspiracy theories", I limit myself to mainstream sources in showing that the perception is dangerously inaccurate.

1. Support for the Nicaraguan Contras

In the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency published a manual entitled Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfareto assist the Nicaraguan contras in its war against the leftist Sandinista government. The manual advocates for the use of "implicit terror" in order to maintain control over the population. Although it does discourage "explicit terror", this has less to do with any principled opposition to it than with the practical concern that "this would result in a loss of popular support." Elsewhere, the manual states that "it [may] be necessary…to fire on a citizen…trying to leave the town or city in which the guerrillas are carrying out armed propaganda or political proselytism…" "It is possible," it continues, "to neutralize [i.e., assassinate] carefully selected and planned targets, such as court judges, mesta judges, police and State Security officials." Evidently, gunning down civilians does not fall under the category of "explicit terror".

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