Anyone silly enough to believe the US wants to bring democracy to Iran should have a look at what the US is currently doing to sabotage democracy in Iraq.

President Trump has been aggressively threatening to cut off Iraq's oil revenue if it allows the return to office of former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom the Trump administration views as too sympathetic to Iran.

And the threats appear to be working, as Antiwar's Jason Ditz reports:

"Once and possibly future Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's candidacy is increasingly in doubt this weekend, with reports that President Trump's demand he not be allowed to return to office increasing the possibility that the Coordination Framework bloc may withdraw him as their choice for premier.

"Last year's Iraq elections ended with the usual deeply split parliament, though the State of Law Party's fourth place finish with 6% of the vote was generally seen as enough to give Maliki the coalition leadership, since current PM Mohammed al-Sudani does not intend to return.

"Late last month, Trump demanded that Maliki step down from the nomination, but he refused at the time, saying that the US should stay out of Iraq's internal affairs. Maliki was already Iraq's PM from 2006 through 2014."

Ditz explains that Trump is able to sway Iraqi politics with credible threats due to the US control that was imposed on the nation's economy following the Iraq invasion:

"Underpinning this whole thing is that after the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the country was restructured such that all of Iraq's oil revenue was paid in US dollars through the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Since that revenue is almost the entirety of Iraq's government budget, that means the US can virtually seize Iraq's treasury at any time and bankrupt the country on a moment's notice."

This is what US-imposed "democracy" looks like in practice: giving a nation the freedom to do what Washington tells them to do and elect the leaders that Washington allows them to elect.

You may recall that the narrative to justify the US coalition's overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was the urgent need to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. The US literally titled the invasion "Operation Iraqi Freedom". They then killed a million people, plunged the region into chaos and instability for years, and ensured that the Iraqi people would forever remain under the boot of the US empire.

There is no excuse for a grown adult to believe the US empire wants to bring democracy to Iran. The US consistently props up dictatorships and monarchies in the middle east exactly because they do not want the will of the people to determine the actions and policies of the governments of those nations. Truly democratic states in the region would see people using their votes to elect leaders who are hostile to Israel and the United States, and who set fossil fuel policies which advance the interests of their own people rather than the interests of the western empire.