It's not completely wrong, though. Iran has spent significant resources on a nuclear weapons program, as well as sponsoring foreign terrorist organizations and other military activities. We can argue about whether those things are right or wrong but they really happened and consumed resources that could have been used to improve water infrastructure. Guns or butter.
Believe it or not, other things do happen in the country aside from what is reported on in western media. Claiming this is all they do is heinously ignorant.
Of course. Like embezzlement. I live in Iran and if you want a more detailed picture of the situation I find data provided in [1] well-researched. The executive summary is that one of the military branches really doesn't care about the environment as long as they get more power / money / anti-US proxies.
Also, that "Tehran will run out of water in two weeks" statement came from the president, and some neighborhoods really don't have water for several hours each day. The official advice is to "install water pumps and storage tanks."
> other things do happen in the country aside from what is reported on in western media
Of course they do. The forced expulsion of Afghan workers and refugees didn’t get a lot of coverage, but it’s prominent in regional sources.
OP isn’t arguing there isn’t any good in Iran. Just that the corrupt theocracy has pursued unsustainable goals cruelly and incompetently, and in a way that has turned Iran into a unique menace to the region through its embrace of similarly-totalitarian proxies who couldn’t give fewer shits about their populations.
To the extent there is a propagandized version of the story, it’s the one that ignores what every Iranian refugee and what every one of Iran’s’ neighbours say. The irony of that is Iran behaves as a revanchist imperial concern, the precise philosophy many enlightened types in the West claim to reject.
Don't presume to put words in my mouth. No one is claiming that military activities is all that Iran does. But the reality is they do choose spend a fortune on military aggression. These are optional activities. They could choose to stop and devote those resources to civilian infrastructure if they wanted to.
I’m pretty sure if the Iranian missile program had not demonstrated its ability to exhaust and defeat the sum total of all western missile defense production and force a truce, that the discussion would be around which European population would get the plantation of Ulster treatment with the tens of millions of refugees.
> Not surprising. A country that invests all of his money on nuclear weapons and threatens the West with bombings- will actually care if it's capital is drying up?
