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Some times I forget how naive and anti American many of the posters are on this forum. This take hugely discounts the tail risks of having an unstable country with a history of exporting terrorism having these things. What if the leadership changes in the future or some part of their government, or if it results in other middle eastern countries proliferating as well.
Iran exports less terrorism than the USA (probably) or the USSR (definitely) did during the Cold War. Unless you think that Israelis count for more than, say, Londoners, which I suppose the American establishment does. Both superpowers funded the IRA, although I suppose the involvement of Rep Peter King (IRA-NY) doesn't technically make the IRA an official US client group. Empirically, being a state sponsor of terrorism is not strongly correlated with being a country that can't be trusted with nuclear weapons under MAD.
Not for a lack of trying. If Iran had the resources of a peer-level superpower during the Cold War they'd definitely have tried to export their proxy model worldwide, not just in their local neighborhood.
It isn't Iran's model. It was first set out a written policy by the Kennedy-era CIA (the "plausible deniability" memo which would later be made public by the Church Committee) and had already been in use by the USSR since the late 1950's.
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I'm pretty sure it's not naivete or anti-American sentiment but rather an intense burning hatred for Jewish people and the resulting desire to support just about any country which is anti-Israel, even if (especially if) it increases the likelihood of nuclear war. Edit: My evidence for this is that there seems to be a big overlap between (1) posters who consistently side against Israel no matter what; and (2) posters who argue that a nuclear-armed Iran isn't a serious threat.
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Yeah it's absurd. One of the greatest threats to the entire planet is Pakistan losing a war to India. Or winning a war to India. Or tripping over its own feet and having an economic crisis.
As soon as nukes are in play the country becomes an existential threat to civilization, even if the more likely outcome is hundreds of thousands to millions dead...that is not good.
North Korea does not represent the full range of nuclear countries, and we haven't even played that one all the way out.
Iran is far more likely to use it, sell it, or cause problems than any current nuclear actor and the inability to recognize this is simply horrifying.
Or having another member of technical staff go rogue like this guy did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan
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This is called 'tuesday' and so far, no nuclear war. Seriously, Pakistan has a military coup every few years. It has subsaharan Africa level stability.
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I don't think this is true - ever heard of the Samson option? I'd trust the Iranians with a nuke far more than Israel.
Samson is a defensive stance, Iran is an aggressive nation with offensive interests that present existential threats to its neighbor as well as more mundane severe threats.
Fundamentally Iran is a nation that is running around punching people in the face. Who is more problematic, the guy who can punch back hard, or the guy punching people in the face?
lol, lmao
I'm surprised, I thought you would have kept up with news from the Middle East if you're going to talk about it with that level of confidence. This may come as a shock, but Israel is currently invading Lebanon, deploying white phosphorus on civilians, demolishing homes, blowing up hospitals and now moving settlers in to build houses on their newly acquired living space. They are in fact punching people in the face, right now! They have been punching people in the face for several years, and they launched the first strike on Iran.
This is an absurd position. Israel has had nukes for ~30 years. Tehran still exists and Israeli nukes have never been used.
There was also no conflict between Israel and Iran under the shah. The entire reason this conflict exists is because the Iranian regime wants to kill all the Jews.
The consequences Israel would face for nuking Tehran are worse than the costs imposed by having Iran continue to exist. The optimal strategy for Israel would be to trick some other country into invading Iran for them, and I think the Israelis agree with me on that front.
The shah who ran an incredibly authoritarian and repressive police state so that western powers could continue to extract Iranian oil without having to share the profits equitably with the Iranians? That shah? The Iranians have a lot of extremely valid reasons to oppose the state of Israel, and collapsing it down to "they just want to kill all the jews" is lazy thinking that gives you a worse and less-clear picture of the world.
There's a difference between the regime and the Iranian people, which I'm sure you know. The Iranian people give probably nearly zero shits about Israel as a country. The regime is a bunch of theocrats who are very interested in exporting fundamentalist Islam and destroying Israel.
I believe at this point the Iranian people are very much opposed to the Israeli government after what happened to that girl's school, which they resolutely do not blame their own government for. I also believe that they can see what's happening in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon - and that's an incredibly compelling argument for making sure that Israel has no ability to do the same to them. The recent protests are impossible to really evaluate - I haven't seen any real evidence that they murdered 40k of their own citizens, and I have a distinct lack of trust for any protest movement that is tightly bound to and working with a foreign intelligence service (see the multiple comments about the involvement of the Mossad and the US government).
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I'm not going to respond to your entire ridiculous Gish Gallop, however it is worth commenting on the hospital thing since it's a great illustration of the distinction between defense and offense.
This may come as a shock, but once you use a hospital as a base of aggressive terrorist operations, it's fair game as a target of defensive measures.
This isn't reddit anymore buddy. You have to actually make an argument if you want to convince anyone - come back when you're capable of participating in an adult conversation.
This sort of comment was not acceptable on the Motte even when we were on Reddit. Don't do this.
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Oh, then kindly identify two hospitals which (1) Israel blew up; and (2) were NOT being used for offensive purposes against Israel. Please provide cites and links for your claims.
Once you've done that, please provide similar backup for each of your other claims.
In other words, put up or shut up. Although somehow I expect you will do neither.
P.S. This isn't reddit anymore buddy. You have to actually provide evidence if you want to convince anyone
Wikipedia actually has a giant list of them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_during_the_Gaza_war
While it is actually extremely difficult to prove a negative, there's no real verifiable evidence that these hospitals were actually secret terror bases. Wikipedia covers these allegations as well, and for the majority of allegations the evidence provided is "classified Israeli military intelligence that cannot be made public" - i.e. completely worthless, because if they did have that evidence they would doubtless release it.
Similarly, we can actually point at a very consistent Israeli pattern of attacking medical and aid workers - are you familiar with the murder of Hind Rajab? You're more than welcome to make the argument that the five year old girl was actually a secret Hamas military asset, but I don't think that'll get you very far.
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When someone is antagonistic to you, report the post, don't respond in kind.
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For what it's worth, your post was clearly not a Gish gallop and the accusation seems in bad faith to me, but I'd also recommend a better reaction than this sneering.
That said, on the specific issue, I think you're correct - any criticism of Iran for being aggressive needs to have the context that Israel is also a very aggressive nation.
Same question for you then:
Please identify identify two hospitals which (1) Israel blew up; and (2) were NOT being used for offensive purposes against Israel. Please provide cites and links for your claims.
Once you've done that, please provide similar backup for each of the other claims. In other words, kindly put up or shut up.
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"...deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a "last resort" against any country whose military has invaded and/or destroyed much of Israel.[1]"
Defensive. Stance.
Iran has been engaged in terrorist attacks against Israel for literally decades. Now also engaging in terrorist attacks on other non-Israel neighbors.
Offensive stance.
All Iran has to do to be left alone is not engage in terrorism (well, prior to recent events). That seems like a simple ask.
Of the two approaches referred to as the Samson option (threatening europe and asia for failing to defend them or just simply nuking the entire region if they were about to fall) none of them qualify as defensive. They serve solely to make the rest of the world suffer if the Israeli regime falls. That's not defensive, just spiteful - and further evidence that Israel needs to be disarmed for the sake of the entire world.
Israel has been responsible for far more terror attacks than Iran. How much white phosphorus has Iran used against civilian populations?
Pedantically, there's a difference between "war crimes" and "terror attacks". Also pedantically, use of white phosphorous as a concealment is legal.
Less pedantically, how many cluster munitions has Iran used against civilian populations? Those have much less of a legal grey area than white phosphorous does, even if they weren't a key moment in Spec Ops: The Line.
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I do not understand the way you view the world.
I cannot imagine hating jews so much that you feel compelled to paint being the victim of terrorist attacks as terrorism.
I cannot imagine hating the jews so much that you support adversaries that want you and your way of life to end and die, just as I can't understand woke LGBTQs who support islamic fundamentalism that quite literally would appreciate it if they die.
The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
And perhaps most importantly, I don't understand why all the anti-Jew posters can't just hate Israel and want Iran to lose at the same time.
Like why the heck not?
Israel is the out-group and Iran is a far-group. Any harm that comes to Iran is a win for the hated out-group.
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You might want to work on your cognitive flexibility then - I can imagine hating jews that much pretty easily, it isn't particularly hard. More importantly, I actually have to imagine it - I get along just fine with the torah jews and other antizionist Jews. When I object to the murder of Hind Rajab, the ethnicity of the people doing the shooting of young girls doesn't really enter into the calculus. If they were Japanese Shinto practitioners, I'd feel just as strongly about what they did! Israel is singled out not because it is the Jewish State consisting of Jews practicing Judaism, but because it is in large part funded by western power structures and has a direct negative impact on people.
I don't believe the Iranians are adversaries that want me and my way of life to end, and I've gotten along just fine with Shia Iranian coworkers in the past. There's been far more hostility to my way of life as a result of the countless wars in the Middle East that have been fought for Israeli interests.
You really should work on that - it isn't hard at all to understand why people who don't like Israel would want Israel's chief regional competitor to remain strong and capable of causing problems for them. The only reason Iran is a problem for people in the West is that our governments are helplessly tied to Israel - the Strait of Hormuz was free for everyone to transit until Israel forced the US into this war (as per the claims of notorious anti-semites Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump).
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It’s worth noting the extent to which America has exported terrorism:
We pressured Saudi Arabia to fund Wahhabi mosques globally as part of our fight against the Soviet Union
We supported the Mujahideens to the tune of 4 billion USD
We produced millions of violent jihadi textbooks for the youth in Afghanistan (lmao)
Of the ~100 Islamic terror attacks in America since the 90s, virtually all of them have been Salafi-Wahhabi and none of them have been Shia (Iranian).
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Agreed. Even if we accepted for the sake of argument that the Supreme Leader himself would not order a first strike, how confident are we in the rest of the Iranian regime's command and control infrastructure?
Even after you've decapitated half of their leadership, they're still acting more rationally than either the US or Israel, so quite a lot, actually.
Please define "acting more rationally"
What have they done that you think marks them as "more rational"? What specifically is it about of the US, Israel, and the Gulf States recent dealings with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the IRGC that you view as "irrational"?
"Acting proportionally to an aggression" for a start.
The bombing campaign in itself far exceeds anything Iran has done against US or Israel, and threatening to bomb their civilian infrastructure was psychotic.
What about all the rapes, murder, and torture on 10/7?
Nothing, why would it be otherwise? The US and Israel don't answer for every crime of every militant group they sponsor.
The Iranian proxies are effectively Iran. They are given military supplies, intelligence, training, Human Resources and at times direct directives and orders.
They are a part of Iranian foreign policy and essentially part of the military - given recent events you could even argue that for the most part they listen to Iranian directives better than the actual Iranian military.
That's a world apart from the US dropping off some RPGs and training to the Taliban against the USSR.
You were doing that crap up until a few years ago, and that's assuming you're not doing it still. It just comes off as "it's ok when we do it".
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Why can China be the biggest trading partner with most middle eastern countries without wasting trillions on wars? What has the US gained from all these wars? Supporting wars that flood Europe with migrants is anti war.
Iran wouldn't want nukes if the US wasn't meddling in the middle east.
The terrorists that bomb the west are Sunni groups that Iran is fighting. Iran helped defeat ISIS and fought all sorts of extremists in Syria.
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That doesn't worry me any more than I worry about the slight chance of getting hit by lightning when I walk outside while it's raining.
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