So inevitably America will take down Iran.

[Shagly]

How, when and with what?

 

[unregistered]

 

[Saint Peter]

Turn the sand into glass.

 

[unregistered]

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

If the pet puppy Isreal whines long enough they probably will - yes.

 

[CandiCame]

In the library, with the revolver.

 

[Shagly]

In the library, with the revolver.

Shooting at Quran's.......

 

[QueenLevitra]

Turn the sand into glass.

Don't bother, it's poor quality.

Has that greasy feel.

 

[VoteForMe]

How, when and with what?

Didn't I tell ya? Axis of Evil

 

[Lord_Steve]

Fucking extremist!

this but unironically

 

[phrodeau]

How, when and with what?

Subversion, the way the US has always operated in the Middle East.

 

[CandiCame]

Whatever happened to our culture being so awesome that others would want to emulate it? Wasn't that whole "shining beacon" thing in a bunch of our early documents? What happened to that? Why don't we ever just flat out "out awesome" shit like we did with the English and the Nazis?

 

[1sickbastard]

Whatever happened to our culture being so awesome that others would want to emulate it? Wasn't that whole "shining beacon" thing in a bunch of our early documents? What happened to that? Why don't we ever just flat out "out awesome" shit like we did with the English and the Nazis?

Centuries of resentment over being colonized by European Nations, which the USA suddenly inherited post WW2. Follow that with the defeat of the Soviet Army by the Muhajadeen, the American pullout of Beruit after a car bomb wreaked a Marine barraks in the 80's, the abotive attempt at "nation building" in Somlia in the 90's and a host of other factors, not the least of which was Gulf War 2 (the sequels are rarely as good as the first), 8 years of Dubya, the collapse of housing crisis, 24/7 worldwide media, easy access to the web, etc, etc...

It's too fucking late for a history lesson....

 

[thør]

Turn the sand into glass.

Even the pistachio trees?

 

[CandiCame]

Centuries of resentment over being colonized by European Nations, which the USA suddenly inherited post WW2. Follow that with the defeat of the Soviet Army by the Muhajadeen, the American pullout of Beruit after a car bomb wreaked a Marine barraks in the 80's, the abotive attempt at "nation building" in Somlia in the 90's and a host of other factors, not the least of which was Gulf War 2 (the sequels are rarely as good as the first), 8 years of Dubya, the collapse of housing crisis, 24/7 worldwide media, easy access to the web, etc, etc...

It's too fucking late for a history lesson....

None of that makes the culture less awesome. From what I understand, it's a cultural war more then a political one. I mean, i know that wars are always political, but all you hear is about how "our decadent western culture" is bad.

And it is.

But we don't give a shit. And there's nothing that anyone can do to make us give a shit. That's a well documented fact over the past 200 years. Win or lose, we keep doing what we're doing. And our goal, as the world's shining beacon of democracy, if my 3rd grade social studies remains in tact, is to bring democracy, the one true form of government (glossing over the republic thing we've got going on here) to other countries and eventually rule the world.

Now that may sound like a supervillian plot, because it is, but at the very least we've stood by it- no matter how stupid it got, no matter how convuluded or flat-out retarded. At least we're striving for unity.

America is kind of the answer to the question that no one asked.

By the way- I didn't learn any of the stuff you were talking about in history class, but some of it does sound vaguely familiar from video games...

 

[EllieTalbot]

That's highly debatable, and I think Douglas Murray has it right.

Due to the current sociopolitical climate here, I doubt America's going to take down Iran, and neither will Europe. We'll stall and delay and huff and puff, and nothing more. And when intelligence makes it known that Iran's production of a nuclear weapon is imminent, it's Israel that will strike.

It will be a tragedy, and whatever chances the Iranian people had to overthrow the Ahmadinejad/Khamenei regime will be gone.

And like the rest of the world, we'll condemn Israel and ignore the fact that our inaction made us partly responsible.

Contemptuous in Concord,
Ellie

 

[Dr_Vibes]

How, when and with what?

Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick.

 

[CandiCame]

Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick.

I beat you to it.



Interestingly enough- we both said library. It's gonna be in the library.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

That's highly debatable, and I think Douglas Murray has it right.

Due to the current sociopolitical climate here, I doubt America's going to take down Iran, and neither will Europe. We'll stall and delay and huff and puff, and nothing more. And when intelligence makes it known that Iran's production of a nuclear weapon is imminent, it's Israel that will strike.

It will be a tragedy, and whatever chances the Iranian people had to overthrow the Ahmadinejad/Khamenei regime will be gone.

And like the rest of the world, we'll condemn Israel and ignore the fact that our inaction made us partly responsible.

Contemptuous in Concord,
Ellie

Agree

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Iran’s Terrible Rationality
By Rich Lowry
February 24, 2012 12:00 A.M.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, thinks that Iran is a “rational actor.” He is indisputably correct.

Iran has, quite rationally, concluded that if it spins thousands of centrifuges to enrich enough uranium, it will soon have the bomb. Just as rationally, it believes it can string the West along. Then there is its airtight chain of cause and effect in the alleged plot against the Saudi ambassador to the United States: If it hired a Mexican drug gang, and that gang blew up a Washington, D.C., restaurant, and the Saudi ambassador was dining there at the time, the ambassador would die. Q.E.D.

General Dempsey said too little and too much about the Iranian regime. Tehran couldn’t have made itself into the world’s foremost exporter of terror and extended its tentacles throughout the Middle East without resorting to rational calculation. That’s obvious. What Dempsey is implying, though, is that a regime capable of such calculation can necessarily be deterred if it gets a nuclear weapon. That’s an unsupportable leap.

If there’s one thing we should have established beyond doubt during the past decade, it is that involvement in terror attacks on American soil is extremely costly to the perpetrators. Nonetheless, according to the U.S. government, the Iranians hatched a plot against the Saudi ambassador where the risk bore no relation whatsoever to the possible reward — from our perspective.

More fundamentally from our perspective, there is no point in establishing a theocracy, killing innocents abroad, pursuing sectarian war, crushing protesters, denying the Holocaust, and threatening Israel with annihilation, either. From the point of view of the Western liberal tradition, the Islamic Republic itself makes no sense. Yet there it is, withstanding punishing economic sanctions to pursue the weapon that the regime wouldn’t want in the first place if it accepted international norms.

If the Soviets, the famous “evil empire” bristling with thousands of nuclear weapons, could be deterred, why not Iran? The Soviet leadership became more pragmatic over time. After Nikita Khrushchev renounced Josef Stalin, it didn’t believe that war with its enemies was imminent and inevitable. Iran’s religio-ideological fire, in contrast, is still burning hot.

A highly ideological leadership with a sense of desperate urgency is the enemy of deterrence. In 1941, Dean Acheson rightly said: “No rational Japanese could believe an attack on us could result anything but disaster.” Except the Japanese — driven by a sense of honor alien to us — believed that they only had two choices: getting squeezed out of China by the U.S., or launching a risky war.

Even in the Cold War, deterrence almost failed. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the airstrike and invasion pushed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff might well have unwittingly prompted a nuclear exchange. The defense secretary at the time, the late Bob McNamara, maintained that “we lucked out.” Ah, yes, that crucial backstop to deterrence — luck.

The Israelis can be forgiven for not feeling very lucky. Do we think Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will establish a “red telephone” to smooth out misunderstandings after Iran goes nuclear? The Iranian regime is factionalized, and it is sure to be the most fanatical elements that control the nukes. It is also prone to bouts of popular unrest threatening its existence. If the regime ever believes it is going down, national martyrdom might look gloriously alluring.

In March 1945, Adolf Hitler gave his infamous Nero Decree, essentially calling for the destruction of Germany. After the first U.S. atomic attack on Hiroshima, the Japanese war minister mused about how wonderful it would be if his nation were destroyed “like a beautiful flower.” It is in this tradition that former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — a relative pragmatist — said that “even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

On his own perverse terms, Rafsanjani’s reasoning is unassailable. He’s just another “rational actor.”

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Sounds about right...

Any attack on Iran's nuclear program will, in the absence of preparatory psychological warfare, unite the Iranian people against the attacker. Germans who had no use for Hitler and Nazism nonetheless fought harder when Allied troops entered Germany itself, and Russians who feared or despised Stalin took up arms against German invaders. Iran's government is obviously relying on its people to react similarly to any Western effort to derail Iran's nuclear program, and may in fact want to provoke an attack to divert the minds of Iranians from their government's numerous shortcomings. This is why a PsyWar campaign must precede an attack on Iran, and it may in fact make such an attack unnecessary.

The campaign must educate the Iranian people that the West has no quarrel with them, but only with their rulers, who plan to attack other countries with nuclear weapons. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "World Without Zionism" poster shows a glass ball with the Israeli flag falling through an hourglass, along with a broken one with an American flag at the bottom. Iranians must realize that their leaders are effectively brandishing weapons of mass destruction, which both invites and justifies a pre-emptive response.

The first step of such a campaign is to identify the Propaganda Man, or hypothetical audience we seek to persuade. Most countries have more than one Propaganda Man. In Iran, for example, we have the soldiers who control the means of violence, as well as civilians who live in fear of the government and religious police. Both audiences are likely to dread the inevitable nuclear retaliation should their rulers put their threats into effect.

The propaganda campaign should therefore state, "The West has no quarrel with Iran unless Iran starts it, in which case the target of Iran's aggression would have no choice but to retaliate in kind and with overwhelming force. Tens of millions of Iranians would die, and the great cities and proud heritage that date back to your Persian ancestors would lie in ruins. This [insert pictures of victims from Hiroshima and Nagasaki] is not what you seek for your great nation, but it is where your self-serving rulers are leading you."

The phrase "self-serving" is important because a leader who does not serve his followers loses what China calls the Mandate of Heaven: the right to lead as derived from effective service to stakeholders. This argument can be phrased with the ancient Indo-European word dher, for the duty of a leader or ruler to care for the welfare of his subjects. It appears, for example, in the name of Darius (a king of Persia), Jemadar (lieutenant, holder in trust of a body of men), and Dharma (the Right Way). The Iranian words for duty and stewardship should therefore be used as often as possible.

The first step is therefore to persuade Iranians that the Ahmadinejad government, unlike a true Persian leader, rules for its own benefit and not for that of its people. The next step is to tell Iranians, and especially those who control weapons, what they can do about it.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012...ust_precede_strike_on_iran.html#ixzz1nP3vTkAW

 

[mercury14]

.....

Did you really just make three posts in a row without having a single independent thought of your own?

 

[phrodeau]

Did you really just make three posts in a row without having a single independent thought of your own?

That would be "par".

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

So just making one post with no thought makes you superior?




Hmmm...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

From 1991 to 2003, the Security Council passed a long series of resolutions reinforcing the restrictions on Saddam's government and implementing the "Oil-for-Food" program (Resolution 986). The program allowed Iraq to sell a fixed amount of oil on the world market in order to purchase food and other humanitarian supplies for its citizens, thus staving off a potential humanitarian catastrophe.

Taken together, the sanctions regime was far broader and harsher than anything now being imposed on Iran. The goal of the many Security Council resolutions was to convince Saddam Hussein to change his brutal internal policies and terminate his WMD program while limiting the suffering of the general population.

In practice, Saddam continued to brutalize his own people while refusing to cooperate with the U.N.'s WMD inspectors. Time after time, Saddam stated that he would allow full inspection of his suspected WMD sites, only to renege on his promise or interfere with those inspections at the last minute. For a number of reasons, "Oil-for-Food" was only partially successful. Saddam ran an illicit oil trade of his own and smuggled prohibited items into Iraq. He and his inner circle lived in lavish palaces even as his people suffered torture and privation.

Unquestionably, Saddam continued his efforts to obtain materials to advance his WMD program. In 2003, the head of the U.N.'s Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, reported the discovery of "dozens of WMD-related program activities" hidden from the U.N. He later testified that Iraq was attempting to produce deadly ricin "right up to the end." Contrary to the generally held belief that no WMD were found, Kay observed only that Saddam had not produced large-scale stockpiles of WMD.

Similar to today's efforts vis-à-vis Iran, Russia, China, and, to a lesser degree, other Security Council members hindered successful enforcement of Iraqi sanctions. It took the U.S. and its Coalition partners over a decade to come to the realization that Iraq would continue to play games without changing its fundamental policies.

Clearly, the tough Iraq sanctions were failing. Continuing to "enforce" the ever-weakening sanctions regime was no longer an option. Keeping sanctions in place would have resulted in many more civilian deaths. Had sanctions been lifted without proper U.N. verification and enforcement, it was certain that Saddam would fully reconstitute his WMD programs with potentially disastrous results. This was the impetus for the Second Gulf War.

Fast-forward to today:

Sanctions are predicated on the assumption that leaders will make "rational" decisions based on economic calculations. They will recognize that it is in their own best interest to accept the demands of the outside world in order to avoid isolation and economic deterioration caused by sanctions.

Iran's leaders have so far failed to react according to the Western concept of rationality. Iran's treatment of the IAEA inspectors over the past few days is a disturbing echo of Saddam's actions. Similar to Saddam, Iran's leaders have little incentive to cooperate because sanctions have not limited impact on their internal authority or personal living conditions. They may feel that acceding to external demands would be a sign of weakness and actually hasten their downfall. They may rightly assume that, once they have achieved their objective of developing nuclear weapons, Iran's position as a regional power will be strengthened, and the world will be forced to lift the sanctions. For them, sanctions are only a temporary inconvenience.

Combine all of this with their radical religious beliefs -- Iran is a superior society; martyrdom is the desired course for establishing a worldwide caliphate through the coming of the Mahdi -- and Iran's leaders are acting "rationally" within their own non-Western frame of reference.

Iraq is a perfect example of the futility of sanctions when there is a disconnect between a people's suffering and their leaders' value system and lack of compassion. With this historical precedent, it is hard to understand why anyone would conclude that the weaker and more porous sanctions now being imposed on Iran will cause that country to terminate its nuclear weapons program anytime soon.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/02/can_sanctions_change_irans_mind.html#ixzz1nUbsc4fg