My apologies. P1-P3 are factual. P4 can be debated, and I'll get to it shortly.
Here is where I misunderstood: I thought you were making a general claim about Islamic democracy. In the case of Iran I agree it was western interventionism that pushed them further toward rejection of western values, namely participation in a free global market, women's rights, separation of religion and state, and also western style democracy.
There are cultural factors that determined
what form that rejection took, and this is what I was referring to when I mentioned "intelligent actors" in my first reply.
One such factor was the West fundamentally misunderstanding Islamic, Arab and Middle Eastern culture (and I'll include Persian culture among these, without going into further detail, for the sake of brevity, even though this may be inappropriate), which is why it repeatedly made the same mistakes across different arenas over the years. One thing it severely underestimated is the deep pride that is associated with their world view and way of life, as a holistic entity, to the extent that even adopting a single western property of government, such as
free elections, could be seen as counter to that holistic world view, as defined under Islam.
The link describes the troubled 1952 elections, prior to the UK/US coup. But you can go further and look at elections in Iran all the way back to 1906, and you'll see that there was a struggle through all this period to fully adopt free elections, in the western sense, without strong internal opposition, even as support for further westernization was growing among certain factions (itself a product
both of internal ideological shifts
and intentional efforts by European powers - the British and Belgian going back to the 19th century, and perhaps others I'm unaware of). This complicates your P4, and I don't feel familiar enough with Iranian/Persian history to go through and unmuddy the waters further than this.
Ultimately, at the base of the argument I was trying to make (and this is taken from Bernard Lewis), is that Islam sees itself as more than a third variation on Abrahamic religion. The fundamental difference between it and Christianity and Judaism is that Islam was meant to be a complete way of life for the individual, along with a complete way of running a society, a country, and ultimately a network of countries. It did not go through the power struggles between church and state that were characteristic of Christian countries in the middle ages, which ultimately led to separation between the two. It was seen, therefore as a complete set of guidelines for human societies, which is also why modifying it was met with so much resistance.
I'm not familiar enough with the interplay between colonization and radicalization in Ireland to know how big of a role religion played in the ideology behind that conflict. You are welcome to educate me further if you think it is relevant.
Once again, I'm not disagreeing with you, just saying that there is more to it, and that the unexpected manner in which western interventionism failed to produce stable and safe societies in many Arab, Islamic or Middle Eastern countries, (unexpected from the perspective of the west) has a lot to do with cultural foundations that were laid by previous empires.
