It’s not even education. Many people operate on the belief that being able to use Google and following a couple “experts” on Twitter, of both sides, automatically qualifies their opinion.

At best everyone is repeating the same propaganda talking points, whether US or Iranian (though most of us are from Western countries, so it skews heavily on one side). The Internet is an echo chamber of ill-informed opinions.

Not the whole thread--just the posts I disagree with.

Or rather, a prime example of education != wisdom != experience. Who has experience operating at the geopolitical scale? Very, very few. And this is by nature of the problem: coherent choices are only made at the individual level, by political leaders. The real cohort that should be considered expert are therefore political leaders, past and present. Unfortunately, they all have deeply ingrained bias for their own nation's geopolitical goals, and so cannot be objective. To make matters worse, the context of every crisis point is so unique as to be almost worthless in meeting the demands of the next one, so even experience is not necessarily enough for expertise.

I would argue that the best voices to listen to about such matters are the academic historians that focus on the region involved, and who've studied in great detail the evolution of the region over time, how crises were resolved in the past, and who therefore have an informed intuition for the current state of the region. Furthermore, because they are academics they are practiced in objectivity -- the ability to look at horrifying situations with fascination rather than disgust.

But such experts tend to be ignored for two reasons: they generally aren't charismatic enough to get attention, and "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it; those who do know history are doomed to watch others repeat it". This might seem rather gloomy. It is precisely the same level of gloom with which we would watch any slow-moving natural phenomena threaten life on Earth, for example. Like seeing a nearby supernova explode, knowing that one of it's nuetrino jets will eventually rotate and hit us within 100 years. The mass and momentum of geopolitics is enormous and almost impossible to change, with or without understanding.

So, we chat with each other, armchair quarterbacking this game in which no-one really has control.