The “willing” bombed Iraq claiming false reasons like WMD, ties with Al Qaeda (while the invasion really brought Al Qaeda in), freedom (by death) to Iraqis and removing Saddam (right). Let’s support the same people bombing Iran without any hard facts. Never mind another blow to the UN. Let’s not even acknowledge ethics, the idea of bombing one of the oldest civilisations in the world etc. Why bother with soft power. The looting of Baghdad’s museum was a crime against humanity by all means.
Iran has about three times the size and population of Iraq plus an army not destroyed a decade ago if we’re talking about an invasion.
Iraq still bleeds, Afghanistan is dilapidating by the day. And what’s the plan for Iran, the day after?
The world suddenly remembered Iran’s nuclear effort. While in admittedly nuclear Pakistan religious extremists gain ground but no one gives a straw.
An interesting side effect of a new war will be the extra income for Mr. Putin, at whom US officials were really vexed the other day
The NPT does not say that you’re only allowed to have atomic energy if you “need it,” whatever that means. It says that everybody is allowed to have it as long as they don’t make weapons, regardless of whether they need it or not. Thus, how much oil Iran might have is irrelevant. They have the right to have a nuclear program, period.
Furthermore, it is inaccurate to say that the Iranians are “refusing to let UN investigators in.” The UN investigators do not have absolute power to do anything they want, and uranium enrichment is not a violation of the NPT. If we don’t understand this, we will get nowhere. It would be more accurate to say that Iran is refusing to comply with the so-called “Additional Protocol” to the NPT, which was added much later, on a purely voluntary basis. In other words, it is not legally binding, and Iran’s parliament never ratified it. However, for a very long time, as a gesture of goodwill, they were voluntarily giving UN inspectors access to areas that went far above and beyond even what was covered by the Additional Protocol. They also voluntarily sealed their enrichment plants, which also is not required by the NPT. Then, after the American government continued making aggressive threats, the Iranians ceased to uphold these voluntary extensions to the NPT and unsealed their plants (while still subjecting them to the basic IAEA Safeguards Agreement). Bush is demanding that they adhere to these extra requirements which go far beyond the NPT, much like how he demanded that Iraq comply with all kinds of things that went above and beyond any kind of legitimate inspections. The funny thing is that, had Bush not been so hell-bent on war, he could have had these go-anywhere, see-anything inspections go on for as long as he liked.
Israel also has more than enough nuclear bombs to effectively destroy Iran. Even Robert Gates, the new Bush-appointed defense secretary, stated during his Senate confirmation hearings that, while he believes that Iran wants nuclear weapons, he also believes that they want them as a deterrent only.
And I don’t believe that it is America’s obligation to shape its policy around defending other countries. If Israel or Britain want to fight Iran for whatever reason, they can, but by themselves.
Oh, ye of little memory. This exactly proves my point about how the matter of which countries one “identifies” with or against is largely shaped by the state.
You see, this business about how China and Russia didn’t have “messianic religious zeal” is a very recent invention. Right now, it is convenient for people who want to start a war with Iran to claim that China and Russia didn’t have this “zeal” because it allows them to argue that it’s okay to use deterrence when dealing with China and Russia but not okay when dealing with the much smaller and weaker Iran.
However, if you go back in time a bit to the Cold War, you will find that <i>this exact same argument</i> was used by people who wanted to start a war with Russia: “Those Soviets aren’t like anybody else! They’re all crazy! They don’t have religion and private property, it ain’t right I tells ya! And Khruschev said ‘we will bury you’!” It was an <i>extremely common</i> argument among committed Cold War ideologues that Communist Russia could never be reasoned with because it was run by insane ideological fanatics who cared about nothing other than America’s destruction, and hence a war was necessary, etc. etc. In fact, some of the old Cold-War types like Pat Buchanan will still make that argument when justifying their support for the Vietnam War and so forth. Nonetheless, it turned out that actually it was very possible to negotiate with the USSR, and actually it was much more profitable for America to do so than to start a war, no matter what all the warmongers said.
But now the USSR is gone, and Iran is the new enemy, so the <i>exact same</i> argument has been repackaged. Now it suddenly turns out that the USSR was actually very reasonable, and all the old rhetoric about Soviet treachery and insanity has gone down the memory hole, and now it’s Iran that’s the crazy fanatic. Even though, in its existence as an Islamic state, Iran has started fewer wars than either Russia or America in the same amount of time. And then whenever Ahmadinejad is going to get kicked out of office, suddenly the same exact people will start saying that, oh no no no, he was actually a reasonable man, and that some other evil-guy-of-the-month is crazy and we immediately need to fight a war against him or else we’re all doomed.
So, no, I don’t believe that argument, for the same reasons that I don’t believe used car salesmen.
Because all of these unnecessary conflicts were presented as necessary ones at the time, using the exact same arguments that the exact same people are now applying to Iran, based on scaremongering more than anything else. What was that Bush said about being fooled twice?
Ye of little memory? I was ten years old at the time. O_o I honestly never knew any of that.
Israel has lots of nuclear weapons, yes, but it has never indicated any sort of intention of using them against anyone - unless they were attacked first. They happen to be surrounded by over a dozen countries that would very much like it to disappear; they’ve never actively attacked any of them though they’ve been attacked four or five times already.
Anyway, it all boils down to this. I believe that if there is a clear danger, or the threat of such a danger, against innocent victims on a large scale, then other countries should intervene. The US should have been in Rwanda, it should be in Sudan, and if the situation was slightly different, it should be in Iran.
Of course I’m coming at this from a slightly different perspective. We’ve had similar conversations before, and I don’t recall how they ended, but taking the idea of “not getting involved” to its logical conclusion, if Hitler had decided to implement the “Final Solution” without actually going to war with the West - merely taking over or allying with Poland and part of Russia and exterminating the Jews within those borders - not only would I not be here today, the entire Jewish people would essentially be no more. All because it’s “nothing to do with us”. I don’t want to see anything resembling that happening again. Does that mean I agree with the entire US foreign policy? Hell no. But that’s the tack I want to see them doing.
The problem comes in defining “clear”. If there’s only a 15% chance that an entire population will be annihilated, is that enough to go to war? A 50% chance? A 95% chance?
Once again, in this day and age, the perception of a “clear danger” is largely shaped by the same people who conduct “interventions” based on that perception. In the nineties, Bill Clinton made this exact same argument about “innocent victims” of genocide, and used this pretext to completely destroy the entire civilian infrastructure of Serbia, killing many “innocent victims” in the process. He then blamed absolutely everything that went wrong on the Serbian government (a policy that Bush continued), when in reality, the situation was a bona fide internal civil war between three sides, and the other two sides committed at least as many atrocities as the Serbs (and sometimes more). So I don’t believe we have any business in Sudan either, unless it’s of a strictly non-military nature.
I’m not saying this event wasn’t falsified. Currently, there’s no way for us to know the truth 1 way or another. My point is that this only adds to the anti-Iran dossier.
And no, no one’s going to attack Israel. If anyone nuked Israel, the entire region would glow in the dark for the next 10 000 years. Let’s not kid ourselves and make those kinds of useless statements.
Well, the neoconservatives made up their minds to attack Iran years ago. So, I think that the matter of whether there will be a war depends on whether the “realists” in the Bush administration can convince Bush that he won’t be able to fight a third war when the first two are still unfinished, not on any political events. If they succeed, then Bush can always tell Blair to negotiate for the sailors’ release, and if not, then they’ll invade even if Iran releases them.
Britain should retaliate for exactly what it’s lost, and throw in a bit of humiliation in the process.
Consider the analogy of the line at school. Some little punk walks up to a relatively popular kid, slaps him across the back of the head, and cuts in front. The popular kid knows that you don’t succeed socially by being a pussy in these matters, responds with an incredulous WTF, and shoves the punk out of line with a chuckle. Doing less would make him the target of future assaults, while doing more would make him an overreactive spaz.
No, Britain should not <i>declare war</i> because Iran seized some of its sailors. Likewise, doing nothing would be even sillier, and would invite abuse from other nations. But it seems that one group wants to kill thousands of people for the capture of fifteen; the other wants Britain to be altruistic at its own expense, nevermind the selfish motives of other nations; and meanwhile the West loses whatever reputation it had for equanimity, rationality, and moderation.
This analogy would be appropriate if Iran had seized British citizens on British territory, or if it had seized British civilians who were engaging in peaceful activities, rather than British troops who were in territory that was disputed by Iran and a country that those same troops were occupying after an invasion on false pretenses. The role of the British in the Gulf is not quite as innocuous as that of the law-abiding popular kid who is standing in line and minding his own business.
The analogy only fails if Britain was blatantly in Iran’s waters. Otherwise, there’s no point splitting hairs over any boundary. Britain is a respected and powerful country, and you do <i>not</i> seize its sailors because they <i>may be</i> on your territory. In the past, British sailors have voluntarily surrendered after entering Iranian waters, and to capture these ones was a flat-out insult.
Sure, but that’s not “equanimity, rationality and moderation,” that’s the gangsta-rap logic of “yo, I gots da Gs so niggaz gotta show respect, yo yo yo and some shit yo.”
Perhaps we might reimagine the analogy as follows. There is, again, a school line. All of a sudden, a big kid from high school appears, beats the living shit out of one of the kids, throws him out the window, and takes the thrown-out kid’s place in line. Then, after having thus already cut into the line, he repeatedly threatens the kid in front of him with the same treatment. Finally the kid in front of him smacks him upside the head, and none of the onlookers is able to see whether or not the big kid had moved in on his position first.
If war between Iran and either Brittan or America was inenvitable (and only if) then bomb later. Or at least until someone actually has a plan that consits of more than ‘take the evil overlord/organization dead or alive’ and wild goose chases. At the very least they should finish what they’ve already started before plunging deeper into chaos.
You’re complicating the analogy in a one-sided way. So a high schooler walks in and punches out a middle schooler, fine. But a few years back, the middle schooler attacked and killed several of his cousins. Now the high schooler wants to search him for weapons, and the middle schooler is doing as much as possible to make that difficult. Moreover, the high schooler’s best friend just said, “Shit, he’s got a gun, do something!” So the high schooler (Britain) punches the middle schooler while the best friend (America) punches a lot harder. A couple years pass, during which the high schooler becomes the line supervisor. Then a second middle schooler slaps the high schooler/line supervisor across the head because he <i>may</i> have been cutting in line.
We can keep complicating this analogy, but at this point it’s no longer useful as a concise summary of the situation. All I mean to say is that a powerful and respected nation, which does not retaliate when another nation humiliates it and profits by methods of questionable legality, does not remain powerful and respected. You call this “gangsta-rap logic”; fine, but I’m willing to bet that Aristotle and the “rationality and moderation” crowd would agree with their logic. In any event, <i>I</i> would endorse such limited retaliation, and I’m confident many others would also.
A lot of American liberals believe that America is the only country which should be held accountable for the bad things it does. It’s an ironically bigoted viewpoint; assuming that only America can be held at fault for what it does wrong, as though other nations are infants or mentally challenged persons who simply “do not know better” or something.
I’m a liberal, politically, but I’m often ashamed of the company that puts me in over here in the states. It’s probably not better much of anywhere else, but “Liberal” over here means you’ll put up a sign saying you don’t like the war or make jokes about Bush’s inability to speak, but do fuck-all about it, for the most part.
Indeed, as Sephiroth added, I think the lack of official U.S. response is also largely because half of the world would essentially understand our actions as “Pot (America) to Kettle (Iran): You Are Black.” The lack of individual or international response is the negative stereotypes about Islamic nations, and so on as I said earlier.
As for the issue of Iran’s nuclear power, I refuse to support any move to tell them not to develop nuclear power when we have it. Until we disarm, we have no right to tell other nations to do the same because we have this notion their leader is a “crazed extremist” or what have you. There’s a rumor going around that ours is one of those, too. Hell, there’s been a rumour going around that he is the devil incarnate among some world leaders. Because they think negative things of our government, shouldn’t we disarm as we ask Iran to? Our own people are asking for it and we’re not doing it, why should we expect Iran to when people they don’t really even care for ask them to. If we have a right to nuclear power, so do they.
EDIT: Aristotle’s “rationality” proved that sun was at the center of the universe. Also that slavery was not only moral, but necessary to any and every society, and that women were inferior to men, let’s not forget. I find myself disinclined to instantly agree with whatever “Aristotle’s crowd” says before actually thinking it over. Rationality and logic can prove anything when you start from a false premise. That’s the beauty of them.
Well, it’s not just not concise, it’s plain false, since Iraq had agreed to unconditional inspections by the end, as well as further measures such as dismantling their already-pathetic missiles. That’s why Bush kept making additional demands every week, until he finally stated outright that, even if Iraq complied with all the demands, there would still be an invasion. Bush and Blair knew that Iraq had no weapons, and if they had really thought Iraq had any means to defend itself, they wouldn’t have attacked.
Furthermore, the addition of “the high schooler becomes the line supervisor” is bizarre, since it appears to imply that America/Britain have some kind of legitimate authority to “supervise” a region that is thousands of miles away from their borders. My whole point is that Britain’s presence in the Gulf is <i>itself</i> a hostile “method of questionable legality.” It’s not a cool kid who’s just minding his own business over in the British Isles, it’s more like a punk that has just attacked a much weaker kid without provocation, and is now in conflict with another punk. For Britain to fall back on international law as a defence against Iran looks extremely weak and hypocritical when Britain has just committed a monstrous violation of international law of its own. This fact will also be looming in the background if Britain decides to engage in “moderate retaliation.” But your arguments ignore this fact and simply cite Britain’s alleged respect and power as a reason why no one should ever be able to diss it, which is why I called them gangsta-rap logic.
The point is that Britain already lost its alleged reputation for “equanimity, rationality and moderation” long before encountering this situation, when Tony Blair pushed for the Iraq war (and the bombing of Serbia before that). What they do in response to Iran actually has very little impact on that fact. If they want to have any serious claim to those things, a good first step would be withdrawing to their own borders and ceasing to participate in wars of aggression. That doesn’t mean that <i>Iran</i> did anything in any way good (if you want my opinion, I think they should have immediately released the sailors even if they were trespassing), but that’s another matter. And personally, I don’t particularly care how Britain reacts to Iran, as long as they don’t expect us to fight their battles for them.
Be fair. Aristotle may have been wrong in his Physics (and many other things), but his Nichomachian Ethics is at least worth looking at. And yes, he was wrong many, many times. He had the best guesses that could be had in Classical Greece, however.
And I feel somewhat ignorant about all of this politics stuff. I used to keep abreast, but now I find that I… don’t. Are there any especially good websites/newspapers that would be informative in this area?
This is different in that Iran has actually supported terrorism and isn’t really afraid of being bombed. With Russia and China, both sides have been trying to avoid war and neither wants to bomb or be bombed. Iran is a different beast.
It’s not different at all. A few decades ago, there were plenty of people who would have assured you, cross their heart and hope to die, that Russia was “different” from any other opponent in history because it was run by insane Communist ideologues who didn’t care if a nuclear war occurred, as long as they could just destroy “freedom.” Now Iran is the enemy of the day, so the same argument is now being advanced against them and Russia suddenly gets promoted to being a “reasonable” country. Nobody really “wants” to get bombed, it’s just convenient to say that when someone wants to demonise their opponent. But if America could coexist with Stalin and Mao without anybody starting a nuclear war, there’s really no reason why Iran would be so much more dangerous.
SK, you’re basically making the statement that since the US/Britain have been wrong in the past about countries’ military ambitions, that we should never believe them. Essentially, it’s a national version of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. The problem is that the potential consequences if they’re right are so catastrophic that I think we need to take them into account very seriously rather than simply saying that because it’s the US saying it that it can’t be true.
Frankly, all the discussion in the world about how terrible the US butting its nose into other people’s business is won’t change one thing: there are times when a country decides to punish innocent civilians in a way that can only be described as genocide. It’s not often - Germany, Rwanda, and Sudan are the only ones that I know about. It’s not a war, it’s not a battle, it’s not a tussle between two groups, it’s genocide. Those people getting murdered have no one to fight for them. If powerful nations don’t get involved, they’re putting to shame all the “Never Agains” they spouted after the second World War. I simply can’t see how any action that other nations take could possibly be worse than genocide.