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Did Iran's more aggressive actions demonstrably help them in any way?
There's no double standard here. Nuclear weapons are nice to have and dangerous to get.
Then why are you bothering to talk to me?
Look, there are plenty of reasonably stable and well-off regional actors (like Egypt) that have been able to walk back hostility towards Israel. And the result has been that the US gave them piles of foreign aid and weapons systems. I don't see why Iran could not have done the same (except that they did not want to and given the belief systems of the people in power, attempting to do so was likely not a politically tenable option).
No, I have noted in the past where I thought their actions were more or less reasonable. You have at pretty much every turn failed to defend their actions in the sense of tying their specific actions to reasonable objectives and then demonstrating how their actions have succeeded at furthering those objectives. I've done that for you – for instance, noting that retaliating to the US killing of Soleimani was pretty normal - but I still have yet to see any argument from you that, e.g., mining the Strait (although I've noted the incentives for doing so) or funding Hezbollah has on balance succeeded in achieving Iran's reasonable goals.
It's very important for states to tie their means to reasonable ends and rational interests. A state can't just say "we want to achieve X and we are going to do so by doing Y" and then have no interest in whether or not Y is an effective means of achieving X. This is the sort of behavior that got us in trouble in Iraq. I am suggesting that Iran did not correctly calibrate their means to their desired results. You have not made a case for why their actions have been so calibrated. If Iran says "we want to fund Hezbollah to deter the United States and keep them from bombing us" then obviously they did not succeed in their goal, and it is worth asking if they were deploying the correct means to achieve their desired ends.
I have not seen any demonstrated reason why "not funding Hezbollah" would imperil the survival of Iran, where Hezbollah behaves as they have in the past.
I did not say this. You're discussing this with me, not with some avatar of US policy as you imagine it.
This might be the case, but my understanding is that Iran agreed, by signing the JCPOA, to disclose past instances of previously undeclared nuclear activity, and the evidence suggests they did not.
Were any of these US client states at the time they were attacked, or...?
I'm not sure the US 'needs' to do anything in the narrow sense that it could probably use both oceans as a moat, stop exporting oil, tell everyone "good luck" and more or less be fine "on our own." But I've spent several responses already explaining to you why the US has a certain interest in using coercive force against a hostile regional power that has a demonstrated track record of cutting off international trade and conducting anti-US actions in the region and is seeking to gain nuclear weapons. (The US has at least a weak interest and preventing all proliferation everywhere, to be honest.)
The question for the United States is not "do we have an interest in ensuring Iran does not gain nuclear weapons/cutting off funding to Hezbollah/punishing Iran for funding anti-US militias in Iraq" it is "are we properly calibrating the means with the ends" and "is the cost worth it"? If there was a button in the White House that Trump could press that would just prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, cut off all funding to Hezbollah, and ensure that nobody ever attacked US shipping ever again, it would be a no brainer to push. But we don't have such a button, so the question now becomes "how do we achieve these ends" and "are the costs and risks incurred by action commensurate with the benefits gained." The criticism of Trump pulling out of the JCPOA is that it was counterproductive to US interest; the criticism of the bombing campaign is that the costs and risks are not worth it (with perhaps a helping of the concern about the interest). These criticisms may be correct. But your own support for the JCPOA adequately demonstrates US interests.
Anyway, if the US unconditionally supported Israel, why did we make a separate peace with the Houthis, one wonders.
Me: Yeah, in the United States there is a lot of support for securing the sea lanes
You: That doesn't seem right, most Americans don't like this other thing that had little if anything to do with securing sea lanes
Okay, I believe you. That has no bearing on my point at all.
I believe you are the one who is ignoring the distinctions that I make and lumping all "wars in the middle east" together.
You know, there were several US military operations in the region that were very directly connected to trade. They are pretty obscure compared to the things you mention above, so I can understand not knowing about them, but I've referenced them in our discussion.
Yes, the US could have "helped international trade" by paying off the Barbary Pirates too. (Well...if we hadn't been broke, anyway.) In fact, that was the default response at the time.
I don't know enough about the inside baseball of Iranian politics in the 1950s to be able to answer this question, but it's a very interesting one!
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