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All excellent points! And thank you for this reminder of their many similarities. This point about Iran in particular is not raised nearly often enough:
Too many leftists still have a caricaturistic, orientalist view of Iran's society, a cultural chauvinism that was implanted into our heads by western propaganda.
To be fair, Islamic dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, ISIS, etc. legitimately do approach this caricature. They are extremely repressive and reactionary in regards to women's rights, among other things. The chauvinism comes in when Westerners believe all Islamic nations are just as repressive and reactionary as their allies are. It's a sort of self-soothing and coping projection mechanism for them to justify to themselves why they are allied to these fucked up nations and factions (that they helped create).
Their logic goes: Yes, it's not ideal that we have to ally ourself with these extremist reactionary islamists. But we must do it because they help combat Iran, who are equally evil - if not moreso because they oppose American and imperialist interests and want a nuke. So really, my getting in bed with the reactionaries is a wash because it's done to oppose even greater reactionaries.
That's why they must believe Iran is the caricature. Because doing otherwise would collapse their entire imperialist coalition and internal "logic". They need Iran to be reactionary and evil to cancel out their own side's evil, otherwise there's no way they could continue believing they are the "good guy". The role it plays for Western leftist chauvinists is similar, it allows them to fence-straddle instead of taking a principled revolutionary defeatist position against their own government and its proxies.