Well, rest assured, if anyone can irretrievably fuck it up, it’s Donald Trump.
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But he’ll fuck it up in new and exciting ways!
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In the best ways! With gold accents!
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But to what end? Which leaders? Obama?
Look we had Iraq and we just let it go. What would the point of invading Iran be? Sure we could do it, then what, prop up a new government and leave, and let it go down hill?
Shit, if one said we were going to be Imperialists and going to go in there and take it over and keep it I might be ok with it, as it might lead to some stability, but thus far we have been great at blowing up shit, but poor at setting up sustainable governments.
I believe the 28th Amendment clearly states that “feels > reals.”
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Hurrah! Finally, the chance for a new politics. Getting bored with the status quo. Perhaps I’m afraid of the new status quo.
Obama entered office promising better relations than his predecessor. He infamously dispatched then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to present a “reset” button to Lavrov. That effort came to naught, too, with Putin seizing Crimea, intervening on behalf of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and allegedly overseeing hacks to interfere with the election. Trump now says he is the one to shepherd closer relations. One possible takeaway from this sequence is not that the United States and Russia are on the brink of a new Cold War, but rather than the old one never really ended.
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McCain sang a song on the campaign trail about bombing Iran.
Because they want nukes and we won’t let them with only a fig leaf of moral justification? Because Israel is our buddy and they and Iran hate each other?
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Spent any time in that neighborhood? Ever interacted with Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? I understand that there are a lot of great people there who would like to live secular lives. But there are also a bunch of fanatics who want to kill westerners and Jews. their supreme leader recently remarked that “God willing, there will be no such thing as a Zionist regime in 25 years. Until then, struggling, heroic and jihadi morale will leave no moment of serenity for Zionists”
Remind me again of your expertise here? Did I miss your time in Iran?
Read that in a newspaper?
You can find those fanatics in most countries, including our own.
What is your meta point again? That Iran is the enemy of the USA and we should take them down so it is all cool whatever we do to them?
You say Iran will use “terrorist proxies” to attack the United States at “every opportunity.” In the 37 years since their revolution, can you name a time when they’ve done that, let alone how they’ve used every opportunity to do so? You realize most of the 9/11 guys were Saudis, right (Sunni Muslims, not Shiiites)?
In fact, I can’t think of any terrorist actions against the US that were traced to Iran unless the attacks against our marines in Beirut back in the early 80s qualified.
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Queer people are civilization.
That’s not to say that every queer person is civilized.
Where’s the fun in that?
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OMG, I’d completely forgotten about that movie. Maybe we could put up a double feature of that and “Hunt for Red October” 
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Eh, yeah I think it is a bit different. You can find areas with general Anti-Semitic opinions, and specific groups who want to cause actual harm to Jews in the US. But in Iran you will find ballistic missiles with the actual words “Israel must be wiped out" on them.
I admit I don’t know the ratio of casually Anti-Semitic Iranians (which I imagine is high) to fanatical ones who would actually go to war with Israel or encourage killing Jews in Iran, but the PEOPLE IN POWER appear to be down with the concept, or at the very least, using it as means of exciting the populace.
Maybe not directly, because, you know, the ocean. But they have supported various factions in the Middle East to contribute to terrorism and instability.
While I am NOT in favor of a war with Iran, I also don’t think they are just innocently minding their own business nor harmless.
The first time I fired a shot in anger, it was at a group of IRGC boats that were threatening us. Iranian organized and funded groups are behind a large percentage of the terrorism in the region. And on more than one occasion, I have changed fire with those groups. i have close friends in Yemen who are caught between Iranian-directed militias and Saudi military intervention.
And I do read the papers. Including the Iranian ones. It may be a state controlled outlet, but it does give you an idea of how the Iranian theocracy sees the world. http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13951011001591
I did not say that we should “take them down”. I am fine with the idea of using diplomatic means to keep them more or less isolated, and out of the empire business.
The State Department has consistently labeled Iran as the world’s leader in State-Sponsored Terrorism. Here is the 2015 report-https://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2015/257520.htm
I did not mean to imply that Iranian-led attacks are occurring in the USA. They do, however, attack US personnel and interests in other parts of the world. But Al-Qaeda did and does receive strong support from Iran.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/remember-irans-role-in-9-11-1473290470
https://english.alarabiya.net/en/2016/03/19/Damning-documents-reveal-9-11-links-between-Iran-and-al-Qaeda.html
Well actually the US had been spending a lot of money on “missile defense” recently. There seems to be an effort to surround russia with missile defense sites. There is one in Poland now and another in Romania. Aegis equipped ships can be linked into an anti missile network to ring European russia.
These systems cannot totally block thousands of warheads with absolute reliability. But it may now be possible to launch a first strike on Russia which takes out a sizable proportion of the countries nuclear defenses. The residual nuclear strike capacity of russia might be sufficiently reduced to mean only a few US targets might suffer from russian retaliation.
So so much for MAD.
Some might consider sponsoring a non democratic government change in a state on russias border to be quite aggressive. Similarly having a large military alliance expand to the border of russia might also be seen as provocative. [quote=“Aloisius, post:53, topic:92022”]
The only mistake WaPo made was saying that the grid itself was attacked. The language they used, at least in the version I saw, never said the hack on this laptop was perpetrated by the Russian government - just that the code itself is associated with a Russian hacking operation.
[/quote]
I read that the malware was old and Ukrainian. So that would be another WaPo error if I remember that right. When I read WaPo articles I see a clear editorial line which appears to be anti russian to me and likely to prompt calls for increased budgets for military spending and intelligence spending. I don’t perceive such calls as in the US ’ S interests (others might - like Jeff Bezos). I accept that these things can be subjective but it’s not the first mistake the WaPo had made. After a while you do have to ask yourself what’s with all the mistakes? WMD anyone?
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We are talking about Iran right, rather than Wahhabists in American allied KSA?
Maybe the US should militarily intervene in KSA for the same reason?
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The US is spending much needed money on missile defense. It was a hot topic about a year or so ago.
Reading the posts here, I can’t help noticing that if the Russians did want to spread disinformation and distrust they’ve succeeded; we have posters asking us to take their statements on trust and then accusing others who disagree with them of being “bad actors” or posting in bad faith. On several sides of several arguments.
Gresham’s Law of currency - bad money drives out good - seems to apply to information too. It becomes all about competing voices and who can shout loudest to most people. A country with a controlled media can potentially jerk around a country with few or no controls with little fear of repercussions in kind - and as both Russia and China have controlled media they start off with an advantage.
The question I ask is why attention is focussed on Russia when China would seem to be the bigger threat to US power and influence - and when we know that Chinese nationals have had access to quite highly secured US facilities and many Chinese students have been placed in the US. North Korea and the South China Sea are surely globally as important as Crimea and Ukraine.
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I’m not saying that either but @max_blancke seems to be buying a lot of US propaganda without reflecting on it either.
They, Iran, have huge issues with Israel and vice versa. Israel has bombed them within the last decade, as well as co-authoring Stuxnet with us to attack Iran’s nuclear efforts. They clearly have an ongoing cold, occasionally almost hot, war with Iran.
Iran has ambitions to be the pre-eminent power in the Middle East. Other than the religious rhetoric and the unpleasantness when they toppled the torturing dictator we propped up there, the US really has no business messing with Iran outside of our alliance with Israel. The way we nuclear powers lord over all the non-nuclear nations and pretend that we have a moral high ground on nukes sticks in my craw as well. I don’t want every nation to have nukes but I also don’t pretend that just because we got them first means we can morally pretend that it is ok to bomb anyone (or threaten to invade) anyone else who tries to develop them either.
Max was claiming that Iran will (does?) attack us at every opportunity through “terrorist proxies.” That’s just utter BS.
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Why should I, an American, care if they are in the empire business? What business of ours is it?
The Saudis are far worse (as is Pakistan) but we support them and decry Iran. Uh huh.
Too bad that’s not what you said in your earlier statement, eh?
Maybe they did later but you are conveniently ignoring that Al-Qaeda, at its genesis and under Bin Laden, was an extremist Sunni movement. You know who Sunnis hate more than America? The Shia.
I’m going to take what Lieberman or any other government official says about Iran with a salt mine (not a grain) given the US’ ideological grinding on Iran for decades.
We probably agree about non-intervention, at least the main points. And in many cases it appears that our allies are poorly chosen. However, I might suggest that there are some levels of mass murder and genocide where we should intervene, if we can do so productively, without making things worse. But as were are straying far from the topic of the post, I will leave that point.
