Iran Catch-All | Protester Massacre? CBS reports 12,000+ killed

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BlooVooDoo said:
Not quite. Putin may not want a nuclear armed Iran but clearly wasn’t too concerned given that Russia supplied Iran with uranium. And Russia doesn’t need Iranian oil. They are a net exporter of oil - the second biggest exporter in the world.
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You are correct that Russia doesn’t buy oil from Iran on a large basis, but Iran has been complicit in helping Russia bypass sanctions and with swaps and in infrastructure development
 
Callatoroy said:
Are you saying Iran wasn’t trying to enrich uranium and build a bomb?
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I’m saying they aren’t close to having that capabilities and peaceful options should have been explored. There was no imminent threat, but now we put a target on it backs for the sake of Netanyahu
 
RaiGuy said:
I’m saying they aren’t close to having that capabilities and peaceful options should have been explored. There was no imminent threat, but now we put a target on it backs for the sake of Netanyahu
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We tried peaceful options.
 
I'm not in principle against using weapons against Iran. The current regime is awful. These are the guys who held an election that their candidate - Ahmadinejad - lost, and pro-western protests erupted in the streets. Khameni and the hardliners cracked down, and imprisoned, tortured, and killed the opposition leaders, most famously Neda. They imposed their theocratic government on the people, and backed it with force.

This is the same population that has more women with graduate degrees than any other country on earth, that under the (horribly corrupt but culturally lax) Shah saw women throwing off their hijabs and adopting western-style dress. The people of Iran are not and never have been our enemies, and the diaspora population of Iranians in this country assiduously refer to themselves as "Persians" to distance themselves from Khamenei and his lackeys.

Getting those guys out of power would be great. But as far as i can see, it would have to be a carrot and a stick sort of thing, to let the iranian people know that we westerners would support them in establishing a true liberal democracy (and an apology for the Mossadegh/BP travesty of the 1950's would help a lot). That we do something to encourage them to see us as liberators - as the Iraqi people initially did.

But I don't see any carrots here. It's just an "axis of evil" sort of simplistic view that paints them all as the problem, where the solution is violence. In that scenario, history shows us time and time again that people will elect a strong man who promises to protect them and who paints the aggressors as evil. I don't know what the political/social climate inside Iran is right now, and I would love it if there was a strong, grassroots campaign to overthrow the government and install a democracy. But I'm very skeptical that that is happening. I have some hope, but that's about it.

It's made worse by the fact that the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia (and the other Arab gulf states) are seen as enemies within Iran, and that by getting involved militarily we're taking sides in this deep, simmering conflict. I know for a fact that there are a ton of Americans who don't understand that Iranians are not Arabs, and that there is a millenium-long tradition of hostility between the two. It also doesn't help that most Americans remain willfully ignorant of the basic fact that the Palestinians have had their land and property stolen from them, are subjected to humiliating conditions, and that very few people around the world are standing up for them and the clear injustices done to them by the Zionists within Israel. IOW, there is good *reason* for Iranians to believe that in supporting the Palestinians they're standing up for the oppressed.

Our role for a long time has been - and in my view should still be - a neutral broker for a stable international order. Yes, it benefits us economically, but we don't have to be exploitative about it. I think we took a large step in squandering that tonight, but my real concern is that Iranian proxies will hit us back, and then we'll hit them back, and things will escalate.

I also think that anyone who thinks "Yay! We took the opportunity to hit them, and we hit them, and we win!" is naive at best. Bombing our enemies didn't work in Vietnam, it didn't work in Iraq or Afghanistan, and there's just no good reason to think it will work now.

Meanwhile, China sits back and is actually becoming the global superpower who negotiates these regional issues to its own economic benefit. Like we used to do until the dipshits took over our politics and our government.
 
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