The Shrine

Let it go on the record that I am reversing my position on the Iranian nuclear deal right now.

My new position is that no Middle Eastern country should be allowed nuclear weapons at all - not Iran, not Israel, not Egypt - none of them. They can't be trusted; not a single one.

We need to get out of the goddamned region.

But we probably won't. This one act of hate by the ayatollah will probably lead to the war that everyone has been trying not to have for five years...and for once, I'm not getting in the way anymore. The Iranians had opportunity to act like civilized people; but the ayatollah's speech was in RESPONSE to a crowd of Iranians chanting it first.

Guess I get to make some candles for the human race yet again in coming months.

http://www.businessinsider.com/irans-le ... lks-2015-3

Well, one of the site I go to that constantly advocates for spending more money on missile defense says deterrence assumes we sort of know what the other party is thinking, which might be sort of true if they're Russia or China. Even if we think Putin is a bit crazy, he seems like a guy who probably isn't into mutual annihilation. On the other hand, we really have no idea what guys in Middle East or North Korea are thinking.

Middle East has been a mess historically and it's probably because USA for a while is stronger than the rest of the world combined that they have the power to enforce some sort of order. If not for oil there's no huge incentive for USA to worry about Middle East, but then that leads to the question how safe would the world be if they just ignore Middle East and let them fight it out themselves.

I appreciate the response, Don.

The way I see it, we are stuck being "policemen" to two nuclear-armed nightmares - one which is bribing the American political system and hides behind us like a big shield, and the other of which is implacably embittered at us for the 1953 coup against them planned largely by our grandfathers, that very few people alive today have anything to fucking do with, and wants us all dead even when Obama IS bending over backwards to try to get new peace talks started.

It's just such a fucking mess. I am tired of these barbaric theocracies.

Every single one of them thinks it's okay to manipulate others, lie, cheat, steal - that war and victory in it make you "strong" and that peace is for the weak.

I have been yelling my head off for peace talks for fifteen years and none of them care.

Much as I hate to say it, my own heart is hardening; and my desire to risk America's military to prevent these people from going to war is failing.

American military families are largely drawn from our poor, who have no real choice in the careers they have chosen (our military hires a lot of people who are more or less unemployable elsewhere, and always has), and I am tired of seeing the American poor suffer because everyone else, everywhere in the world, from Wall Street to Tel Aviv to Tehran, can't get their acts together and act like human beings who understand that other human beings have a right to live.

No one wants Iran to get nuclear weapons, that is the purpose of the deal.

The idiots in the Republican party are attempting to screw that deal up. Seriously, they should be thrown in prison on charges of treason. At the absolute minimum, they should all be removed from their seats, and have successors elected to those positions. If the treaty falls through, it is all because of what those Republicans did, they are sabotaging relations with the largest power in the Middle East.

John Oliver does a good job of explaining the drone situation:


The main reason Indo-Persian people hate Americans so much is because the country is represented by murderous predator drones which swoop down and murder elderly and children in front of their loved ones. If Russia, for example, had a bunch of Predator drones killing people all over North America, you would want them dead too. The US Predator Drones terrorize a larger population of people than ISIS does.

As far as Nuclear Arms. No one should have them. It's terrible that weapons like this have ever existed.

Julius Seeker wrote:The idiots in the Republican party are attempting to screw that deal up. Seriously, they should be thrown in prison on charges of treason. At the absolute minimum, they should all be removed from their seats, and have successors elected to those positions. If the treaty falls through, it is all because of what those Republicans did, they are sabotaging relations with the largest power in the Middle East.

This is the point I'm hung up on. What do those idiots have to do before they are held to account for such a complete (and public) undermining of national foreign policy?

I was under the impression that you don't want to just 'get any deal' with Iran because the sanctions do have a noticeable impact on them so if you lift those for not much of a deal that makes you lose leverage and they could just go back on their word later. Since Iran produces oil, once the sanction is lifted they will be able to get a lot of money (which is why the sanctions hurts them enough for them to want to negotiate) and they can easily be in a position where they get enough money while the sanction is lifted and then go back on their words.

1) One of the big problems is this: I don't think it is POSSIBLE to stop Iranian radicals from getting nuclear weapons. My assessment is that if Israel and America and the oil axis of Defense money bombed Iran tomorrow as they so fondly desire, at a cost of thousands of American/NATO lives and possibly millions of Persian ones, and every conventional centrifuge location got wrecked, the remnants of the ayatollahs' axis would go underground, move whatever they could salvage to secret locations in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan (which are already lousy with this shit), and we'd end up facing the prospect of a nuclear al-Qaeda/ISIS.

2) There would be a lot of hope if Rouhani, the Prime Minister of Iran - who is legitimately and actually a moderate - were running the show. He literally wished the Israelis a happy holy day a few years ago. But he's not; as we all know, Khamenei is the "Supreme Leader" of the nation now, thanks to the 1979 revolution against our LAST corrupt lousy government over there, which the CIA and British Petroleum tag-teamed on in 1953 to stop Mossadegh from kicking BP out of the country - which looks like a worse decision in retrospect than ever, and Eisenhower's worst legacy; since it's become very clear over the intervening years that BP is one of the worst fucking collections of human beings on the planet. I still remember when they magically presided over the Deepwater disaster and then tried to say Americans couldn't visit our own beaches to take pictures of their shitty fucking mess or get arrested; honestly, how dare we let foreign corporations threaten the arrest of US citizens?

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/diplomania ... m-1.545503

I will say one thing though Seek - letting Iran have nuclear power and having us oversee it is NO guarantee that we get a greater chance to make sure they don't make bombs.

The Persians are a 6,000-year-old nation and quite canny; "diverting" enriched uranium from any active reactor is...distressingly easy; I know that because I DID take international defense from former SECDEF Perry once, and you all don't want to know how easy it actually is.

I am also quite sure that this community doesn't want me going off at length about how Israel's own decades-long policy of nuclear smuggling is the real reason Iran will not give up nuclear ambitions, I will not go off at length; but the notion has to be brought up at least. Iran wants nukes because Israel has boatloads of them, which they pretend they don't have and won't declare.

Before Khamenei's stupid speech, I actually, legitimately thought the Iranians would do two things with a nuclear program:

1) Get the nuclear power program they wanted, which no one really has a moral leg to stand on in telling them they can't have.
2) Get a nuclear stockpile of their own to rival Israel's with and not use it, which I THOUGHT before this would actually be good for the region and peace, in much the same way that America and Russia's nuclear programs have kept OUR nations from a brutally disastrous war between superpowers.

However, Khamenei has so kindly reminded me that "leadership" in the Middle East translates to being a bunch of lying theocratic nutcases everywhere; and at this point I would invest in moving to the Moon before promising that either he or Netanyahu can actually be trusted not to use their nukes at some point, so that's another theory of mine that depends on humans being rational, reasonably decent creatures absolutely shot to shit. >_>

All I can really say is that I really believe both Netanyahu and Khamenei are both a pair of shitty, insane, untrustworthy, violent assholes with NO REGARD FOR AMERICA, and fuck them both for it, because WE could have been a lot worse to both of them by now by far.