Target: Iran, How Close Are We?

So... China will just sit on their hands during a war then?

I have been waiting for years to find a place to insert the lyrics to China by Red Rockers. Thanks!

Ah, they'll probably just be happy that their economy is doing well and they're not bogged down in a war.

Oh, and then they'll attack Taiwan, since we're distracted in two wars.

Why? Last time a nuke was used against another country, it managed to stop a world war.

I don't know if I'd call it constructive or positive. I'd call it effective.

Personally, I think we were after Iran from the get go. Look at the countries we've invaded since 9/11: Afganistan and Iraq, and oh look at the map! Iran is surrounded on two sides by Afganistan and Iraq. How convenient! This is a classic strategy in Risk, to surround an opponent before going in for the kill, to leave no possible escape route, and while I understand that Risk itself is a game, that principle is a very sound one strategically.

I think the main reason that people are gravitating towards the "nuke em all" is that the region has been nothing but a headache to most Western nations for the better part of last century and throughout all of this one, and I think people are getting sick and tired of hearing the same thing over and over again.

America is like its people: impatient as all hell. Think of this case as a teacher clapping her hands to get the attention of a classroom, and when the classroom doesn't respond to that, slamming the door loudly. The nuclear option is the door slamming.

(BTW, I already think the US is fucked at this point so I'm all in favor of going out with a bang and having fun along the way til we get the shit kicked out of us.)

it took 2, but then again, there was at the time speculation as to whether the first was really the US's doing or some natural disaster.


Yeah, true that. Makes you wonder in a paranoid manner if the islamic extremists aren't working for the US?

So are we going to declare war this time? Or just move in troops that congress might fund out of pity and then declare that emergency funding counts as war declaration like last time?

Considering the U.S. hasn't declared war since against Romania in 1942, I wouldn't count on it.

I'm setting this whole topic on Condition Red.

lol... amazing how the death penalty deters murderers!! look at all of those deterred murderers, all lined up on death row... deterred... (and a good number of them falsely incarcerated... arranged death to only appease the angry living is a sloppy process. btw - we're still one of the very few countries in the world with the dp - along with such lighthearted countries as - iran... iraq... syria...)

YES!!!! lol - and so are you dear now that we have that out of the way...



yes, yes, yes... i lived through the latter half of it... and the privilege of history is when it's over, it's nice to relax and forget about how stressful that period of time was. point being, 'cold war' <> 'preemptive nuking'. 'mutually assured destruction' <> 'preemptive nuking.' -nothing- equals preemptive nuking, except... preemptive nuking.



coaching the poor, unfocused kid down the block into channeling his energies, say, into boxing a punching bag instead of beating up his siblings, is positive. telling him to beat up -other- poor, unfocused kids instead is not.

look, iran isn't a very pretty scene, and no, i would not like to visit it (with their present fundigov). it is disheartening to see what appeared in the ninties to be an easing of the iranian culture, only to have it snap back all fundamental-like. funny how that seemed to happen after we 'elected' (stillllll debatable!!) a guy who's hero is 'jesus'.



here again, i insist - it's an inevitability. 1) take it as a given, 2) set a better example than the rest, 3) work good diplomacy, and 4) HOPE it works!! (yes, hope - because that's all you get in life, short of the primal satisfaction of punching somebody in the face. if you're too paranoid to put up with hope, then... please get help.)



(psst - and we've dabbled in creative treaty-skirting too, but i don't have time to homework all that. and waving nukes around while yelling 'DON'T BUILD NUKES OR WE'LL NUKE YOU!!' is just the height of inanity to me - and seems to me the -surest- way to assure ourselves a visit from a wandering suitcase bomb or somesuch down the road.)



lllol... arming one to fight another - 'diplomacy'. (i detect sarcasm in your statement; i just hope to draw it out a little more... one mistake on top of another, and another, and another... so i kindly differ using that as an example of "diplomacy". selling weapons isn't diplomacy... it's selling ourselves off as a target to future aggressors.



(psst - still debatable.) so please, don't blame -me- or any of my friends for this 'leader', this situation. i sure am not blaming -you- for his mistakes. nor will i ever support, condone or otherwise passively agree or ignore his mistakes...



strong international pressure requires leadership and clout. gw's blown both easily. (and i would never let that guy try accupressure on me... he's a fumbling, bumbling fool.)



we -didn't- go into iraq with just britain... though not the longest allied list, it had its notables (germany, italy). all it took (lol - -all- it took - as if it was a weekender op was for us to be revealed as 'crying wolf' over iraq to lose credibility. (hey - remember trying to -buy- turkey for the operation? lol...)

i CANNOT believe ANYTHING our administration claims anymore. and neither can the rest of the world.

i would also -love- to believe that this is all stupid mad talk, and it won't happen anyway. then again, i didn't think iraq would happen. i didn't think he'd get 'elected' the first time. i didn't think he'd ever, -ever- get 'elected' the -second- time. i didn't ever believe that an american president could be -this much- an idiot. and idiots are not safe. nice to think they're just harmless fools, but they aren't.

and everyday, every minute more given in power... is just another opportunity for more 'get them before they get us' paranoid snaps... or maybe it was never a paranoid snap, except for the media sale to the american public... for them perhaps, this is simply cold calculation... a stock investment... cashing out the lives of another country's population. yeah, well fuck them, huh? that's all it takes. if life is cheap... then so is yours.

funny how that 'death penalty' vibe wrapped around.)

Imagine how many more murderers would be out there if not for life sentences and the death penalty. (Though life sentence, I believe, more than the latter.)


Oh? What do you think NORAD was about? Nuclear ballistic submarines? The idea of "first strike" and who had it? Same thing.


It doesn't equate. Helping one single child who grew up in the same area with most of the same ideals is a lot different from changing the ways of an entire foreign government with a radically different idealogy from our own.


Oh, for sure it's our fault that we armed Iraq to fight Iran in the 80s, that we have a power-hungry leader, but now we have a mess on our hands, and we have to deal with it, regardless of how it started.


"Gee, I hope I don't get robbed" isn't nearly as effective as "Gee, I think I'll lock my doors."
"Wow, I hope I don't get syphyllus" isn't nearly as effective as "Hmm, lemme use a rubber."
"Boy, I hope food magically appears in my plate, my rent gets paid on its own, and nice stuff arrives free from UPS on my front door." isn't nearly as effective as "Perhaps I should get off my couch and get a job."

So, no, you're mistaken. Hope is just a seed of motivation, not a means itself.


Nothing about war is pretty or nice. That's why it's war. Threatening people isn't nice. It is, however, part of an overall strategy.


Oh, agreed wholeheartedly. I wish we would stop creating messes so we don't have to deal with them later.


True. And it's our collective fault for allowing our country to be led by him.


I'm sorry, I forgot about the couple hundred troops which make up "the coalition of the willing" that were placed as far from combat as possible.


Sure, but we still have to deal with it until 2008. Or perhaps 2007 if we can vote in enough democrats to impeach Bush.


Kind of makes you lose faith in the common man, eh?


Well, at this point, this seems like the kind of course of action we *should* have done in Iraq - namely - make it clear what was not acceptable, and continue to put international pressure on. I think there are a variety of thoughts on what the timeline of things might be, but until we start hearing repeated TV conferences using the words "use of force" and "we will defend ourselves", I think we can assume Bush is still working on the Iraq thing.

QUACK QUACK

"War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. "

George Orwell 1984

(If They Installed 324 Times As Many Centrifuges As They Have Now)

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/13/17515/7165

Jesus, someone else remembers this song.

Um this is a serious misconstruction of history, and not at all founded in fact. The cold was could better be interpreted as 40 years of official nastiness. If you want to find specific examples of direct threat, I give you the most obvious of the cuban missle crisis. What people in america do not get is how close we were to to a hot war for forty years. It is easy to look back and think that because it did not happen, the threat of nuclear war was somehow abstract and not serious. The truth is the threat was very real.

For a long time nuclear disarmament talks were the only real diplomacy that went on between the us and the ussr, and the nuclear tension served as a back door to to diplomacy. However, in order for this sort of dimplomacy to work, you must be able to threaten credibly.

Wow. Are some people here really trying to assert that Iran isn't any kind of threat to the US? They are the worst kind of threat. Islamic fundamentalists, with great resources, who hate the US. That's even worse than North Korea--at least they just want to stay in power and aren't saying that Israel should be destroyed. NK probably isn't likely to sell off weapons very much, but Iran? ha ha ha..

But then again, Israel isn't the United States--why should we care if they get attacked? What business is it of ours if Israel gets bombed??? What business was it of ours to attack Germany during the early 1940's, by the way? Hey, it's not our problem, just that other sucker over there!

I find this isolationist thinking dangerous. Sorry for the WWII US isolationism analogy, but hey "you have to admit there are some similarities." (oops, sorry for the Bush is Hitler side reference...)

The problem is that people like Kendra, think that it's the U.S. that is the actual threat.



Your point on Germany is on the money but more importantly, a nuclear strike on Israel is
a coup de grace. The resulting EMP will leave Israel's military useless with out an ability to retaliate. Iran could literally bomb Israel into the stone age before we could stop it.
Fighting a war on our own terms is far preferred than being drawn into a nuclear conflict not of our own control.




What's even scarier is how quickly people are to empower the United Nations. Hell, I did not vote for any person in the United Nations so why should I allow them to have a say in the policies of my country?

-AA

Do I think the greatest threat to the world is the US under the control of a madman fascist like George W. Bush?

Why yes.Yes I do.

We didn't enter WWII until we had declared war. This was after we had been declared upon by Japan and it's stated allies (who did officially declare war on us even though it was after a pre-emptive strike). I'll give you that it was isolationist. But at the time there was no such thing as global super power nations and nobody was looking at us to be the world police that we seem to be today.

Now is Iran a threat to us? Nope. We have nothing, beyond some vague unsupported blustering by their leader, to suggest they are a threat. North Korea, on the other hand, has nukes and rockets that can reach the US. I think the biggest threat so far has essentially saying to Iran, "Hey look, we pounded Afghanistan and crushed Iraq, you're next." If some country took over Mexico and Canada and said, "YOU'RE NEXT", I think we would respond the same way Iran is.

Btw, just so we're on the same page here, everything that supposedly justified the war in Iraq has since proven false. So please take any 'information' coming from the current administration with a pound of salt.

news flash: EMP only affects electronics that are turned on.

How is "destroy Israel" and "death to the US" vague?
How is "Being an elected leader" unsupported?
How is ignoring UN Security Council warnings not a threat?

1) It's not vague. The question is --does he have that much power to carry it off.
2) Ask Bush
3) See above.

I'd like to see Siro's answers to these, since I was directing them to him.

However, I will say that, sadly, Bush is still supported by a whole bunch of Americans, and that is the real root of the problem on our side.

you're all crazy, except garoad et al.

I'm curious. The media hasn't really been pressing Iran as hard as they had with Afghanistan/Iraq. Is the media being supressed to report on this issue? It seems to be deja vu all over again, yet no one seems to care. Why?

are you kidding? the media is suppressed?

Please, tell us about your deja vu and the how the media is suppressed.

They've been saying that forever. They've never mentioned how, or if they intend to be the primary actors. I can say, "Death to Bush!" and not do anything about it ever. It's catchy, but not something I'd ever bother doing anything about.



Do you think Bush is supported by americans as a whole? He's the worst one we've had yet as a president. Despite being elected, he (as well as Iran's 'leader') is unsupported.



Because the people actually responsible for such information say Iran is not a threat. The security council does not consist of well versed physicists and weapons inspectors. On the other hand, the Security Council is still more than likely to listen to any random lie we tell them. So take Security Council warnings for what they are. Oh, by the way, we are still at, what, yellow elevated threat level? Right... You're more likely to be killed by a car accident than a terrorist bombing tomorrow.