SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: I'm no Tucker Carlson fan but looking at the ethnic mix of Iran is probably one of the most relevant questions to ask.

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1935162359146008880

Arnaud Bertrand

I'm no Tucker Carlson fan but looking at the ethnic mix of Iran is probably one of the most relevant questions to ask. And the fact that warmongers like Cruz haven't even considered the question shows we're dealing with the same kind of pre-Iraq war nihilistic hubris, where all that matters is destruction with zero thought given about what comes next. As

@SohrabAhmari

reminds in his latest article (which is a good read: unherd.com/2025/06/the-re), "Persians make up only a bare majority of the country" (if that), while a quarter are Azeri (including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei) or Kurds. You also have significant numbers of Turkic people, Lors, Baluch, Arabs, and smaller groups of Jews, Assyrians, and Armenians. Today the Iranian state manages to bind these peoples together, but in a state collapse scenario, or in a scenario where a Western puppet like Pahlavi is installed, the risk of separatism, civil war and sectarian violence is very high in a country with such ethnic diversity. And before you say "who cares about that?", remember that this is very much what happened in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, and Iran is a far larger and far more consequential state. For one, ironically, the biggest unintended consequence of the destabilization of Iraq was massively increasing Iranian influence in the region - not to mention hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and millions of refugees. Now the same people want to "fix" this by destabilizing an even larger, more ethnically complex, and more strategically vital country, apparently with even less forethought than went into Iraq - which is genuinely saying something.

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