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When is the last time the United States of America shot over ten thousand of its own unarmed citizens for protesting? When is the last time the United States of America had as part of it's legal code a requirement to rape female prisoners before execution to prevent them from having a good afterlife? In what jurisdiction can you receive torture as a sentence in the United States of America?
Execution is fine and just but only for murder and only after a fair trial.
No, that is to demonstrate how far their current delivery systems have been proven to reach, since most people don't know how far Diego Garcia is from Iran. They have been working on delivery systems to reach the US. That is the direction they are heading.
And yeah, I feel comfortable saying I want the US to be able to attack wherever it needs to, and I do not want Iran to attack me. This is only hypocrisy if you view the US government and the IRGC on equal moral footing. You seem to. I don't.
It's not a conspiracy theory that Iran has nuclear material and is working towards making nukes. This is something everyone has known and the framework everyone has been operating under for the past 20+ years.
America doesn't kill its own citizens directly. They kill other countries citizens and in far greater number than Iran. There's also plenty of death by American government inaction, such as with drug overdoses, and plenty of rapes in American prisons. And people can be freely tortured if the CIA wants to torture them.
If Iran wanted an ICBM they could presumably just make one, or buy one from the N-Koreans. The notion that there is an ongoing race against time to get to Iran before they incrementally develop a missile that can reach further and further feels like childish propaganda.
What does this even mean? Nothing of what we were talking about relates to whether or not America should be able to attack where it needs to and no, I don't want Iran to attack you either.
I never claimed that the IRGC were good for Iran. The point was very simple: Considering the fates of Syria, Libya and Iraq, no one should have any faith that an intervention by the US and Israel would have a more positive result for the Iranian people than what they are suffering now. There is no need to attack Iran, there is no 'greater good' that can come of it and the US has no definitive moral high ground or mandate to necessitate their decision to attack Iran.
You are comparing the IRGC to some American ideal like Massachusetts. In which case, I agree, USA all the way! But I'm comparing the IRGC to war torn years long military occupied Iran. Which is better for the Iranian people? Which is better for the world?
This is just not what was going on in the comment you wrote or the comment I replied with. You said Iran was stockpiling conventional weapons to take Israel hostage to buy time for themselves to make a nuclear weapon. Again, what is this? Why do you write this?
I noted that it would make sense for Iran to want nuclear weapons as a deterrent. What gain Iran would have from instigating a nuclear war against the holder of the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world remains to be explained.
You may not like the US, but I would rather be arrested in the US for suspicion of killing my father than arrested in Iran for suspicion of not wearing a head covering.
I would rather be an enemy of the US than an ally of Iran. Iran has responded to attacks by bombing civilian infrastructure of previously friendly countries. Meanwhile, the US is very precisely (as far as these things go) targeting enemy combatants and the infrastructure of war.
There is a huge moral difference between the two regimes which cannot be conflated and it really does color the rest of the analysis.
I mean yes, it is clearly a purpose of Iran to stockpile conventional weapons until the point where attacking them would be too costly to consider. You do not dispute that their long term goal is to make a nuclear weapon.
You do not have to be a conspiracy theorist to just think, if the first objective was achieved, how would it impact the second? It's not a conspiracy, even if absolutely no one in the regime was thinking on these terms it would still be true. If Iran had enough weapons they could hold the whole Middle East hostage and we would have no ability to intervene in their Nuclear ambitions.
And they are willing to do so as we can see with their present actions. It seems that the only fallacious thinking on my part is that they would be content to hold Israel hostage, when clearly they would also turn on the Gulf Coast as well.
As I already said, I too would prefer Massachusetts. But that's not what we are comparing. You act like because Iran is bad that the US must be good and therefor has the moral mandate to do whatever it wants over there as if Iran will turn into rainbows and sunshine after the US bomb or occupy them. It wont. And the millions fleeing their homes, hundreds of thousand Iraqis dead, the families blown to bits in Syria, the children starved or ground to innocent pulps in rubble all over the middle east over decades of barbaric US and Zionist geopolitical strategy are a testament to that.
You weave moral narratives through paragraphs that, much like you accused me of doing, don't look like much when put into context. There are plenty of moral failings, needless suffering and death happening within the US. Did you know that in the US 80 thousand men are raped in prison every year? Well, that's almost half the total prison population of Iran being raped annually. Does this mean I like Evin Prison in Iran? No. And I'd still take my chances in an American prison, but it's not a good vs bad. You can still get sentenced to a rape box with a hateful rapist torturer in the US and be tortured and raped to death. And the authorities will try to lie to your families face about what happened whilst they watch you on a hospital bed, obviously beaten and braindead.
Given the US's track record of bombing civilians, along with Israel doing the same. This is not a serious point by you. The US and Israel have killed almost 1500 Iranian civilians in this conflict alone. In a single strike the US killed more school girls than Iran has killed foreign civilians via airstrike in the Gulf states this war. Hell, the CIA has tortured more people than Iran has killed civilians in the Gulf States. To say you would rather be an enemy of the US than an ally of Iran is completely delusional and so far outside any realm of reason.
Iran bombed their 'friends' because their 'friends' had US army bases and personnel on their soil, and the US attacked Iran. Iran attacked the bases and the hotels where the US army personnel were hiding. This is not a complicated, morally outrageous or otherwise perplexing development. It was completely predictable and Iran even said that this would be their response prior to the conflict.
Again you do not deal with the original claim you made. But instead try to reframe it as something else. And when you do it just sounds like Iran stockpiles weapons like every country with an active military does. So we've worked our way back from your hyperbole to reality. Having your armed forces serve as a deterrent to invasion is not taking those who want to invade you hostage.
On top of that I never said Iran wanting nukes is a conspiracy. And I explicitly said exactly this in my previous comment. If I was Iran I would want nukes, given there are two nuclear powers in the process of bombing me.
The contention here is not 'is Iran trying to get nukes'. I'd assume they are. The question is why shouldn't they try to get nukes? Nuclear proliferation is bad. But when you push the regimes back against a wall, what is their recourse? Both the US and Israel have demonstrated hostile intent to the tune I described in my opening paragraph. They also have nukes and have been flirting with using them against Iran through talk of totally annihilating their civilization or take them out entirely in a matter of hours. So what do you want them to do? Have the Israelis or the US shown any mercy to their rivals in the past conflicts? Aren't they all hiding or dead at this point? Even the ones who were open to negotiations like Saddam Hussein? How can Iran maintain its sovereignty under these conditions?
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And the result of this situation is that the US now has two more enemies (Spain and France)
I'd rather be Spain or France than Qatar, so that's still pretty true.
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What they would gain, and what they think they would gain, are two different things.
Yeah, the outgroup is evil, irrational and can't be trusted. This is also my outgroup
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