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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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I mean, take out the very subjective word "terrorism"

If you disagree that Iran supports groups that are broadly and internationally recognized as terrorist groups, feel free to disagree with the object level claim, but you haven't actually said you disagree.

and this is the same thing that the US is currently doing in Ukraine.

And if a Russian politician tried to make a series of major concessions to the US without the US reciprocating with major policy changes, and without convincing their political base of the appropriateness or necessity or usefulness of doing so for even marginal effects, their efforts would probably not last very long.

If you want to make a deal with an adversary, you need to sell it to your political base. The saying 'only Nixon could go to China' reflects the belief that only Nixon had the political capital and credibility to sell a deal as a valid thing, as opposed to being seen as a sell out. Without the popular legitimacy that requires buy-in, the deal itself means nothing. This is why weak leaders can rarely make enduring changes, as the changes they can implement through their formal power rarely outlive their terms in office. By contrast, strong leaders can make changes to public perception that even their political opponents accept the reframings on some level.

It's not like the Iranians were blowing up Americans who were peacefully sitting on bases in the US.

Why would a reasonable American political establishment or voting base would only care about Americans blown up in the US?

Your claimed confusion why Americans would dislike the Iranians. Part of this is because, regardless of whether people supported the Iraq War or not, only a relative minority are indifferent about the Americans who were there being blown up, or indifferent about who helped blow them up. The US government- even the Democratic parts of it- has long memories of people they have spent in some cases literal decades in conflict with. It only required a short-term memory- contemporary even- to find personal and living grievances with Iran.

For true rapprochement to happen, generally both sides have to make compromises, not just one.

That was one of the arguments against the deal, yes- a lack of equivalent Iranian policy compromise.

The functional compromise the Iranians were agreeing to in the final versions of the deal were... breakout capability, for a limited period of time, without the sort of verification systems that would prevent the Iranians to cheating and completing it unnoticed if they wanted to. This is the same capability the iranians have without a deal.

Ultimately Obama wasn't actually interested in true rapproachment, and didn't even try to sell the deal as such.

As for breakout capacity, I don't see why the US should try to stop Iran from building a nuke to begin with. Why should I care if they have a nuke?

Why should anyone care about the nuclear proliferation opinions of someone who doesn't value nuclear non-proliferation?

The answer is of course your opinion doesn't matter- the question was about why people didn't care for Obama's plan.

Whether you agree or not, most politically-engaged people are not, in fact, indifferent to nuclear proliferation. They tend to be opposed to it in fact. The deal did not stop nuclear proliferation. As a consequence, the deal's maintenance could not be credibly be argued to be needed to prevent nuclear proliferation, because by the design the deal wouldn't do that because it lacked verification and enforcement mechanisms at Iranian insistence.

Also, being belligerent towards Iran is pretty unlikely to get them to treat homosexuals better. Soft power could potentially do it. A full-on invasion could also do it, but that was not an option in 2008 and even if it was, it would have killed probably hundreds of thousands of people, so the tradeoff is questionable.

You seem to have missed the message to the domestic audience. The point isn't that the Obama administration had any hope of making the Iranians change policy (nuclear or gay). The point is that the Obama administration was willing to make major policy compromises to a major abuser, while using far lesser alleged character condmenation to justify not making domestic political compromises.

For his own base, who broadly considered the line of attack valid on a domestic front, it served as an easily co-optable tool against the Iran deal, which they would have a hard line refuting. For the opposition he used the attack against, the contradiction spoke of hypocrisy and insincerity, which undermined any political argument that the opposition should try to maintain a deal whose maintenance could be used to validate a line of political attack against them.