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[Reelya]

Kinda rubbish. Almost all of the terrorists that have been a problem are Sunni. Iran is Shia, the exact enemy of the Sunni. Kind of a severe shortage of Shia terrorists going around the world blowing stuff up. Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, all those are the enemies of Iran too.

There was one document about the threat of Iran from the DoD I read a while back, the main points were "Iran 5 years from an ICBM" (much longer than 5 years ago) which was basically sci-fi, they pointed out that Iran's military is entirely geared for defense, they basically don't have any force-project capabilities or doctrines. And actually, on a regional scale, they're not actually a large spender on the military. It's basically a lie that Iran is causing some sort of arms race. Their total defense budget is $15 billion, compared to the $700 billion of the USA, and it's actually dropped over the last 10 years. Meanwhile the USA is encouraging a massive arms build up in Saudi Arabia, a nation much more plausibly connected with international terrorism.

The real actual threat mentioned in the report was that Iran would conduct diplomacy with their neighbors. That's the thing the USA really cares about. The thing about the ICBMs at the start of the document was for show, and made the point that with "sufficient" international support, Iran could get an ICBM any day. In other words, the regional diplomacy was the real threat in the report, but they had to have the big military scary thing at the start so they basically said that Iran could get an ICBM "any day now" ... if other people built one for them. It's basically bullshit.

[dragdeler]

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[MaxTheFox]

Kinda rubbish. Almost all of the terrorists that have been a problem are Sunni. Iran is Shia, the exact enemy of the Sunni. Kind of a severe shortage of Shia terrorists going around the world blowing stuff up. Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, all those are the enemies of Iran too.

Don't they attack American ships and planes? Aren't they developing nukes (Israel unlike Iran is more justified in having them as a deterrent)? I'm completely on the American side of the Iranian conflict.

[Reelya]

No they're not developing nukes. The USA DoD reports that they stopped work on that in 2003, when Saddam Hussain was overthrown. They were in fact building a nuke, but it was because they wanted a deterrent against Iraq / Saddam Hussain from invading them again. They abandoned that program when the USA invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/world/middleeast/04intel.html

"U.S. Finds Iran Halted Its Nuclear Arms Effort in 2003" article from 2007.

And anyway, a small country doesn't build nukes because they want to nuke things, they build them because they're a deterrent. Firing the nuke fails as a deterrent.

Iran likes existing. They're not going to make a nuke then give it to some random person and have them blow stuff up, because that would be stupid and guarantee that Iran creases to exist afterwards. the idea is just silly to be honest. This isn't a Tom Clancy novel.

[MaxTheFox]

Okay, so they aren't going to nuke anyone. Doesn't change the fact that their government is dozens of times worse than Russia. Their human rights violations combined with aggression towards America are, IMHO, enough to justify an open war.

[Reelya]

You're being ridiculous. Mean words don't justify killing millions of people.

BTW you probably don't remember the time a USA cruiser went into Iranian waters and shot down an airliner killing 290 people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/world/middleeast/04intel.html

A lot of people in Iran don't like the USA much, but the USA has been a pack of right bastards shooting down civilians planes over Iranian airspace and stuff like that. Other nations sometimes accidentally shoot down foreign planes over their airspace, the USA is the only nation that actively comes to you nation and shoots your planes down. The point is, America has encircled Iran and is shooting their stuff down, Iran isn't doing the same to America. Now if Iran goes one foot outside their country and there are American military encircling them and there's some kind of altercation, you're trying to tell me that's Iranian aggression. Maybe America shouldn't be encircling everyone with warships and bombers.

[MaxTheFox]

You're being ridiculous. Mean words don't justify killing millions of people.

What about abusing their own citizens and forcing them to suffer under a totalitarian state?

[KittyTac]

Can we keep this civil? I don't want the Toad to lock this thread for good.

[Reelya]

But America is best friends with many nations who abuse their own population.

Look at the history of Egypt under Mubarak, who was a close US ally. Don't buy into the propaganda, they're only giving you a tiny sliver of the truth and very biased viewpoint.

[MaxTheFox]

But America is best friends with many nations who abuse their own population.

Well fuck those nations too (nothing against the people themselves, I'm not racist). I would try to overthrow them too if I was in charge.

[TheSteppeWolf]

I'm mostly with Max here. Yes, the United States committed enough atrocities, but they're still morally superior to most of the nations they did attack, Operation Condor or whatever it was called not withstanding. That was bad. I want to preferably see the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other dictatorships like China and Russia to be destroyed under a rain of bullets and Molotov cocktails, and replaced with more democratic forms of governance. I firmly believe in "liberty or death". If I was forced to live in a totalitarian state, fascist or communist or non ideological, then I would fight to my death to bring it down. Arson the government buildings, try to assassinate government leaders, agitate people against the regime using drawn posters and the internet (with Tor)...

[Reelya]

Marginally.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/02/hosni-mubarak-legacy-of-mass-torture/

At least 840 people were killed and 6,000 injured during 18 days of protest that finally toppled Mubarak. In addition, victims of prolonged arbitrary detention, torture and other ill-treatment during his 30 years of rule have yet to see any semblance of truth, justice or reparation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93United_States_relations#1973%E2%80%932011

Following the peace treaty with Israel, between 1979 and 2003, Egypt acquired about $19 billion in military aid, making Egypt the second largest non-NATO recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2011-02-03/egypts-role-extraordinary-rendition

Egypt has long been a crucial ally to America's program of extraordinary rendtion –  the practice of sending terror suspects to other countries for interrogation. When Egypt's President Mubarak dissolved his cabinet last week, he appointed Omar Suleiman as his new vice president. Suleiman is already well known in the United States, specifically as the C.I.A.'s key Egyptian contact for extraordinary rendition.

Did you know about this stuff? The USA's own government was utilizing the experienced torturers in Egypt as a way to circumvent international law and American laws against this stuff. Seriously, are we going to trust the same people to go around blowing up all the governments we don't like?

Yeah, I know about Condor, but they brought a lot of that back including some of the same operatives after 2001. This kind of stuff is always an inch away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Steele_(US_Colonel)

Colonel James Steele is a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America, during which he trained counter-insurgency commandos who carried out extreme abuses of human rights. Steele is also a veteran of the Vietnam war. From 1984 to 1986, during the Salvadoran Civil War, Steele operated as a counterinsurgency specialist and was a member of a group of United States special forces advisers to the Salvadoran Army. In 1986 he was implicated in the Iran contra affair. In 2004, early in the Iraq War, Steele was sent by Donald Rumsfeld to serve as a civilian adviser to Iraqi paramilitary Special Police Commandos known as the Wolf Brigade.

Funnily enough, his group in Iraq got accused of doing the exact same things that his groups back in the 1980s did.

[dragdeler]

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[MaxTheFox]

-snip-

Well this is awful. But still better than the Iranian regime and I still want to see an US-occupied Iran.

[scriver]

Okay, so they aren't going to nuke anyone. Doesn't change the fact that their government is dozens of times worse than Russia. Their human rights violations combined with aggression towards America are, IMHO, enough to justify an open war.

I feel there's been  something of a misunderstanding here. I'm don't think anyone has been comparing Iran to Russia. I believe they were comparing it to Saudi Arabia. Which is, like, equally bad or worse than Iran in every aspect, and is the cause of lots violence and conflict all over the region and the world, and gets away with lots of more bad behaviour than Iran because of their alliance with the USA.