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Schizotek posted:Don't loving invade Iran. Nice fanfic. Nobody is seriously proposing invading Iran, and I don't know of anyone relevant who's called for it even facetiously.
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Aug 11, 2016 09:22
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Volkerball posted:Nice fanfic. Nobody is seriously proposing invading Iran, and I don't know of anyone relevant who's called for it even facetiously. Trump.
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Aug 11, 2016 10:27
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Also, pretty sure John McCain is still pretty big on it, though how relevant he'll remain is as of yet unknown.
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Aug 11, 2016 10:36
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Volkerball posted:Nice fanfic. Nobody is seriously proposing invading Iran, and I don't know of anyone relevant who's called for it even facetiously. Its literally the position of the military that a war with Iran would be as costly as I said it is, for the same reasons. Plenty of republicans have openly called for it. Which I guess isn't actually relevant because they'll never see the presidency in the foreseeable future, so what they would do doesn't really matter. e: It's really not a rare position on the right is what I'm saying. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...m=.508d5698daac
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Aug 11, 2016 14:03
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Thank you for that post, Schizotek. For the record me being scared as gently caress that I would be drafted and sent to fight there was the start of me realizing how really hosed up the Bush administration really was.
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Aug 11, 2016 16:39
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Trump isn't going to do 90% of the poo poo he says he's going to do. The man just talks out of his rear end, and he knows it. KiteAuraan posted:Also, pretty sure John McCain is still pretty big on it, though how relevant he'll remain is as of yet unknown. Saying mean things =/= we should launch a ground invasion.
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Aug 11, 2016 16:43
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Volkerball posted:Nobody is seriously proposing invading Iran, and I don't know of anyone relevant who's called for it even facetiously. Volkerball posted:Trump isn't going to do 90% of the poo poo he says he's going to do. The man just talks out of his rear end, and he knows it. Why, how did those goalposts get all the way over there?
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Aug 11, 2016 22:21
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Volkerball posted:Trump isn't going to do 90% of the poo poo he says he's going to do. The man just talks out of his rear end, and he knows it. Yeah but the question is, what 10% would he actually do? Because any 10% is probably enough to destroy civilization.
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Aug 11, 2016 22:24
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He's going to ask to play global thermonuclear war, and this time there won't be no fuckin' tic-tac-toe.
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Aug 12, 2016 00:36
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Polybius91 posted:Why, how did those goalposts get all the way over there? The thing is that Trump can turn around and say something like "Let Iran have Iraq, it's not our problem. We need to take care of our own people." And I'm pretty sure he has said something to that effect. Which would be the exact opposite of aiming to escalate tensions to start a war. If the only card you can play when presented with "no one supports this type of policy," is to point at trump, you've made pretty clear you don't have much of a leg to stand on.
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Aug 12, 2016 04:53
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You can't criticize any policy Trump proposes because he might be lying
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Aug 12, 2016 05:34
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How about Jeb Bush or Scott Walker?
Piell fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Aug 12, 2016 |
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Aug 12, 2016 05:53
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Polybius91 posted:Why, how did those goalposts get all the way over there?
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Aug 12, 2016 06:36
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VitalSigns posted:You can't criticize any policy Trump proposes because he might be lying It's not about criticism. It's about not taking things at face value. Do you truly believe that Trump is going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it? I sincerely hope not. Trump trying to play to the base by making big tough guy statements about Iran is no different. War is not in the cards. If you refuse to accept that, then the inverse is also true, and we have to take trump at face value when it comes to his bullshit claims about bringing jobs back to the US and cracking down on the rich. After all, he said it. Probably about the best examples you're going to get. But again, these guys were both running for president. And neither of them is even in Congress. They have no say in foreign policy whatsoever, nor any influence in their party given how little of the vote they won. Someone describe to me a scenario in which the US and Iran finally go to war after over a decade of handwringing about it without so much as a single bomb going off. A scenario so feasible that it must be actively fought in order to prevent it from coming to fruition.
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Aug 12, 2016 07:33
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Volkerball posted:Nice fanfic. Nobody is seriously proposing invading Iran, and I don't know of anyone relevant who's called for it even facetiously.
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Aug 12, 2016 07:43
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Volkerball posted:
One morning, Trump wakes up his tiny hands shaking in fear. He had a bad dream. He takes 3 viagras and still can't get it up for the Czech hooker in his bed. When he looks in the mirror he no longer can convince himself his hair looks real, or his skin a natural shade. He orders a nuclear strike on Iran.
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Aug 12, 2016 07:46
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What's that old song? The one Hillary likes? Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran
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Aug 12, 2016 08:05
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Ah but no true Republican wants to invade Iran.
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Aug 12, 2016 08:09
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VitalSigns posted:Ah but no true Republican wants to invade Iran. I see neocons. They're everywhere. 
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Aug 12, 2016 08:35
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Hmm, yes, anything that Trump says that I don't like he doesn't really mean. Consider instead the idea that he wants to do all that poo poo he spews, for the same reason he spews it: he cannot conceptualize anything he does failing or any of his ideas being bad, in the same way you or I can't conceptualize life in 37 spatial dimensions. You're in a very dangerous form of denial, and the only saving grace is that somehow America as a whole is, for once, managing to not be as deeply, dangerously stupid as you are. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Aug 12, 2016 |
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Aug 12, 2016 11:11
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Trump is not in government and is never going to be so I don't even know where you're going with this. His thoughts are irrelevant. And it's been made pretty clear that he's a unique character who's views aren't representative of much when it comes to the gop. Especially given how contradictory all his statements are. We're not going to war with Iran.
Volkerball fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Aug 12, 2016 |
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Aug 12, 2016 11:36
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Volkerball posted:
Trump wins: 15% Trump starts a war with Iran just because::10% Trump gets shot, arrested, impeached or couped: 60% His war hawk vp sets policy based on on the threat of war to get Iran to do a thing it does not want to do: 90% Iran does not do that thing: 50% Iran does that thing, but the veep lies about it and starts the war anyway: 10% ISIS does something, and lies and says Iran did it: 5% Some of those numbers are fairly small, but add up all the _different_ ways things could get to be bad and you have a real problem.
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Aug 12, 2016 11:50
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Volkerball posted:Trump is not in government and is never going to be so I don't even know where you're going with this. His thoughts are irrelevant. And it's been made pretty clear that he's a unique character who's views aren't representative of much when it comes to the gop. Especially given how contradictory all his statements are. We're not going to war with Iran. The Republican candidate for president: totally irrelevant.
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Aug 12, 2016 11:53
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Related to the Iran conversation: The question of what part Iran was supposed to play in the broader strategy of our involvement in the Middle East has never really been answered. We had troops massed on either side of their territory, spent 30 years trying to weaken them through various proxies and sanctions, practically declared them an enemy in the 'Axis of Evil' speech, raising the alarm over the Iranian nuclear program, made the accusation that they were involved in helping the Iraqi insurgency in 2007, and then...nothing. In the past 9 years, despite (probably) supporting internal efforts toward moderation during the Arab Spring, it seems that we've suddenly shifted to making serious diplomatic efforts to try and smooth things over. I don't consider a simple change of administrations to be the underlying cause - the change began in the last year of Bush's term. So, what was the plan, if there even was any? During the war, and the years since, only a few individuals involved in or with any access to Bush's circle of advisors have ever spoken about that issue. I apologize for a lack of other sources, but they ranged from saying that military involvement in Iran was never considered, that there was hope Iran would do something to justify either air strikes or some other action on our part, and even to some Neocon hawks floating the idea of a full-scale invasion. I have wondered about what exactly caused the change in course from seemingly building a case for another expansion of the war, to almost dropping the issue all together within the span of a year. My assumption was that it was a combination of the faltering economy, more so than opposition to the war, as well as the increasing instability in Iraq from 2004 to 2006, throwing off some sort of accepted timetable for potential military action. Does anyone else have sources with some idea of what changed, or if there really was a further agenda to involve Iran?
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Aug 12, 2016 16:21
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https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-resolution/65/text/is The war rattling never really stopped, and a significant faction within the republican congress spent a pretty big chunk of the past two years advocating military action against Iran and trying to pass obnoxious "backdoor to war" bills.
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Aug 12, 2016 23:11
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What exactly do they have against Iran? Most of the animosity I can track seems to be from the early 1980's with the Iran-Contra affair, but that assumes Iran has basically done nothing for the last 30 years. ... then again, the Iraq invasion happened for spurious reasons as well, so maybe none of this matters.
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Aug 13, 2016 01:01
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Morroque posted:What exactly do they have against Iran? Most of the animosity I can track seems to be from the early 1980's with the Iran-Contra affair, but that assumes Iran has basically done nothing for the last 30 years. Iran overthrew a US stooge and then said gently caress you America for installing him in the first place and had the audacity to be brown while doing it.
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Aug 13, 2016 01:37
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Barudak posted:Iran overthrew a US stooge and then said gently caress you America for installing him in the first place and had the audacity to be brown while doing it. But that was even further back by an additional 10 years... I would shocked if politicians could have memories that long. There must be something else at work if the grudge can last through more than six different administrations. (At least if I am recalling my Iranian history correctly. They had a mostly-democratic government that was overthrown by British/American forces in the 1960's for acting too socialist near Russia and to steal their oil. The "Islamic Revolution" in the 1970's acted to reverse the puppet government back to a domestic one, but it was more extremist from then on as a defence, and has only began to cool down recently.)
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Aug 13, 2016 01:52
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You are grossly underestimating just how old and hateful republican thought leaders were. Donald Rumsfeld was secretary of defense in both 1975 and in 2005. Many of his fellow luminaries and friends had the same working history. In modern years Iran got some resurgence for trying to build nukes but not having them yet which makes them more desirous to bomb versus folks like China who already have them.
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Aug 13, 2016 01:55
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Schizotek posted:https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-resolution/65/text/is You could call attempts to undermine the Iran deal and maintain sanctions war rattling, or you could call it objectively the right thing to do given how the deal accomplished nothing other than giving Iran a bunch of money to fund Hezbollah and Assad, and has empowered people like Ahmadinejad instead of reformists. I tend to think of it as the latter. Morroque posted:What exactly do they have against Iran? Most of the animosity I can track seems to be from the early 1980's with the Iran-Contra affair, but that assumes Iran has basically done nothing for the last 30 years. The biggest thing your generic Republican has against them is their antagonism to Israel. The Supreme Leader is not one to mince words, and he looks like Gandhi compared to the former President, Ahmadinejad. When you go around talking about the Great Satan and death to Israel, death to America, and all that type of stuff, people take notice. But Iran also has an extensive record of support for terrorism around the world, and they currently have proxy and conventional forces occupying Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and are backing militias in several other countries in the Middle East as well, all of which have a long rap sheet when it comes to human rights violations. I think that's the meat and potatoes of the antagonism to each other. The nuke issue has been hyped up as a result.
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Aug 13, 2016 03:44
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Morroque posted:What exactly do they have against Iran? Most of the animosity I can track seems to be from the early 1980's with the Iran-Contra affair, but that assumes Iran has basically done nothing for the last 30 years. Have you heard of Neoconservatism or the Project for a New American Century? There's a story linked in the OP that touches on both, or you can read the Wiki page for PNAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century Some key excerpts: quote:The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative[1][2][3] think tank based in Washington, D.C. that focused on United States foreign policy. It was established as a non-profit educational organization in 1997, and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan.[4][5] The PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership."[6] The organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world," and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."[7] quote:Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the PNAC sent a letter to President George W. Bush, advocating "a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq", or regime change. The letter suggested that "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq," even if no evidence surfaced linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks. The letter warned that allowing Hussein to remain in power would be "an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."[31] From 2001 through the invasion of Iraq, the PNAC and many of its members voiced active support for military action against Iraq, and asserted leaving Saddam Hussein in power would be "surrender to terrorism."[32][33][34][35][36] To sum up: Quite a few influential people believe the top priority of the United States is to spread freedom with the military. Iraq was a test case, but it wasn't a failure of the ideology, it was because the ideology was failed.
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Aug 13, 2016 03:49
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Volkerball posted:You could call attempts to undermine the Iran deal and maintain sanctions war rattling, or you could call it objectively the right thing to do given how the deal accomplished nothing other than giving Iran a bunch of money to fund Hezbollah and Assad, and has empowered people like Ahmadinejad instead of reformists. I tend to think of it as the latter. loving over the entirety of the Iranian nation for 30 years didn't do jack poo poo to stop them from funding Hezbollah or Iraqi militia, because in the grand scheme of things the weapons those groups use are cheap as dirt. It's done nothing to force regime change or moderation, because it gives the nation a foreign belligerent to rally against. You end up giving the regime a giant blank novelty check to do with whatever the gently caress they want. Long term economic sanctions have consistently proven to be a colossal loving failure at achieving their stated objectives, and it boggles the mind that there are still informed and educated people who support them.
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Aug 13, 2016 04:20
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Schizotek posted:loving over the entirety of the Iranian nation for 30 years didn't do jack poo poo to stop them from funding Hezbollah or Iraqi militia, because in the grand scheme of things the weapons those groups use are cheap as dirt. It's done nothing to force regime change or moderation, because it gives the nation a foreign belligerent to rally against. You end up giving the regime a giant blank novelty check to do with whatever the gently caress they want. Long term economic sanctions have consistently proven to be a colossal loving failure at achieving their stated objectives, and it boggles the mind that there are still informed and educated people who support them. Saudi Arabia can afford a lot of "informed and educated" people.
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Aug 13, 2016 04:24
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Panzeh posted:Saudi Arabia can afford a lot of "informed and educated" people. Volkerball might (somewhat justifiably) view the Iranian government with focused and singleminded hatred, but I really doubt he's on the Maliks payroll.
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Aug 13, 2016 04:42
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Schizotek, as an abstract principle, I'd agree with you, as your conclusion sounds sensible. But with context and facts, that's very clearly not how things happened in this one specific case. Schizotek posted:loving over the entirety of the Iranian nation for 30 years didn't do jack poo poo to stop them from funding Hezbollah or Iraqi militia, because in the grand scheme of things the weapons those groups use are cheap as dirt. For starters, sanctions did not gently caress over the entirety of the Iranian nation. These sanctions were not analogous to the ones in Iraq that resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead. They were modest and focused on the regime and its military. We can take that as true based on the fact that over 3 quarters of Iranians say that their quality of life has not changed a year after the deal was agreed upon. And their militias aren't running around with ak's in the back of Toyota's. They have modern weaponry and humvees. They've provided advanced anti-air missiles to irregular forces like the houthis, and in the case of Syria, they are using their own enlisted forces, and are providing no poo poo military equipment to help Assad sustain a conventional bombing campaign on hospitals and bakeries. The regime is clearly investing very heavily in this type of thing, and the removal of sanctions simply provides the means for them to do so at a greater scale. quote:It's done nothing to force regime change or moderation, because it gives the nation a foreign belligerent to rally against. You end up giving the regime a giant blank novelty check to do with whatever the gently caress they want. The Green Movement in 2009. The rise of a reformist voting base that put pressure on the regime to allow a fairly large number of reformists to run for office. People cheering in the streets for a deal Iran made with the West. All of these developments were unthinkable 20 years ago, and all of them were seeded and grew in a period where Iran was under sanctions. So the idea no progress was made under sanctions is simply wrong. It's a really fascinating dynamic when you consider that when polled, a vast majority of Iranians have consistently placed the blame for sanctions on the West. So one of two things were happening. I remember a year or two ago a poll was run here in the US. I forget the exact wording but the jyst was something like respondents being asked "Are puppies good?" An overwhelming majority said yes. Then later on in the poll they were asked "Do you agree with President Obama that puppies are good," and suddenly, the split was more like 50/50. We could've seen a similar dynamic in Iran in that when asked directly, people would blame the US for sanctions, and yet, dissatisfaction with the Iranian regime continued to grow, likely in at least some form related to sanctions. Although it should be noted that Ahmadinejads administration certainly didn't help the regime to maintain a positive relationship with the people of Iran, so that likely also played a role in the rise of dissatisfaction with the government. The alternate is something like people being afraid to outright blame the Iranian regime with the sanctions on the poll, but deep down feeling that was the case. Regardless, it's very clear that the regime did not have a blank check when it came to domestic approval. They were actually on a rather tight leash. Now since the deal, that dynamic has changed a lot, and not in a good way. The regime was not able to leverage sanctions into support for the hardliner vision of the world. But they've been having tremendous success in leveraging the Iran deal, and it goes back to that figure of 3/4 of Iranians feeling that their quality of life has not changed since the deal. The majority of Iranians have been convinced that the US is not upholding its end of the deal, and that it's still trying to maintain the effects of sanctions in other ways. This, unlike the claim that the West was responsible for sanctions, has resulted in opinion victories for hardliners, and a retreat from the deal by reformists. Ahmadinejad went from something like 30% down to Rouhani in presidential polling to barely 10% since the deal was adopted. Deal figureheads like Rouhani and Zarif have seen their favorability ratings drop, and influential opportunists like Ali Larijani, who played roles in getting the deal passed, are now flip-flopping to oppose it. With such a surge in approval for hardliners, it would be more logical to argue that if anything, the Iran deal provided them a blank check to do whatever rather than the sanctions. To the point that a more cynical person might claim that the regime was attempting to use the deal to boost anti American sentiment all along. I tend to think it was more of a concession to the streets, to show that they can be representative, but the fact remains that if the deal from the Iranian side had been meant to drive a wedge between the US and Iran rather than bring them closer together, it couldn't have worked much better.
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Aug 13, 2016 10:21
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Schizotek posted:loving over the entirety of the Iranian nation for 30 years didn't do jack poo poo to stop them from funding Hezbollah or Iraqi militia, because in the grand scheme of things the weapons those groups use are cheap as dirt. It's done nothing to force regime change or moderation, because it gives the nation a foreign belligerent to rally against. You end up giving the regime a giant blank novelty check to do with whatever the gently caress they want. Long term economic sanctions have consistently proven to be a colossal loving failure at achieving their stated objectives, and it boggles the mind that there are still informed and educated people who support them. I completely agree. The fear of sanctions or their initial shock works. The existing economic elite will fight pretty hard to avoid them but if they lose they disappear and a new power structure builds up around the new normal, now with an excuse to blame problems on the US. And once sanctions are levied there is little more that can be done short of military intervention which is almost always off the table. Hence decades of stagnant useless policy in examples like Cuba, Iran and North Korea. Continued economic isolation just breeds and maintains extremism. To the extent Iran can be brought back into the economic fold it gives us increased leverage to threaten sanctions again in the future on top of any liberalizing effect that comes with economic integration.
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Aug 13, 2016 16:37
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If you asked people a year after Obamacare was passed if their quality of life had improved, I'd bet you wouldn't even get 25%, that seems like a dubious data point to pin your entire analysis to. Reestablishing economic ties to the rest of the world takes a lot longer than a year. It would be far better to judge the deal in five to seven years when the effects will be more widely propagated and analyzed. Unless you know you're the neocon type who much rather see every country in the region besides Israel a devastated ruin. Then you would just spout the same rhetoric that Trump and Cruz did in the republican primary.
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Aug 13, 2016 16:54
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As an Australian, the Iraq War was kind of interesting. I was only a teenager at the time but even that allowed me to note some of the things that happened in the wake of 9/11. For one, the tabloids stopped on the dangers of Asian gangs and started talking about the dangers of Muslims. People started making jokes about "towelheads" and terrorists and a lot of people were also making 'jokes' about nuking Mecca into glass. I think the Australian anti-war protests were the largest in our nation's history, and we still ended up following the Americans into the war. It can't be stressed enough how much the whole thing changed Australian culture. John Howard did a lot of work to turn ANZAC Day from a sombre day of mourning into an American-esque celebration of OUR TROOPS, for example. We began aping you guys wholesale and that's followed us until today. As for me, personally? Well, I'm not proud of how the war affected me. I wasn't in a good place back then - I was a very angry kid. I was the sort of kid who was smart enough to be known for being smart but not smart enough to not socially isolate myself. A lot of my classmates got into really left-leaning politics during the war and I became one of those angry fascist kids. I was pro-war because Saddam was a bad person and he might have nukes and, honestly, because it made some of my classmates flip out to hear someone say it. A lot of this is because, ever since 9/11, I wanted to know more about what was happening. This led me straight into the arms of newspapers like the Herald Sun and, at the time, I had very little conception of what media bias was. I'd proudly call Michael Moore biased when we watched his documentaries in class but I didn't understand how every form of media is biased. Bias, to me, was an active property of something that wasn't part of the mainstream. In the end, I want to say it came down to naivete - not wanting to think that the government and the news media would knowingly or unknowingly lie about something as important as going to war or nuclear weapons. I think what sums it up perfectly is that I thought torture was "justified" if it produced valuable information. I remember actually writing an essay where I mentioned the absurd ticking timebomb hypothetical as a valid argument for torture. My parents, for their part, never really talked about it. I am reasonably sure that my beliefs came purely from consuming the news without having access to any other viewpoints and stupid secondary school personality politics. In a way, it was like getting first-hand experience of seeing how things are working today. But today, I'm a cynical leftist. I'm anti-war, anti-torture. At the same time, I don't think it can be overstated how much 9/11 and the Iraq War changed the world. It was kind of the perfect way to cap off the 90s. A thing that really occurs to me, even now, is the perception of Muslims prior to the war. Everything I knew about Muslims before the war was just that they were a religion and Cat Stevens changed his name based on his faith. They were an absolute non-entity. But in Australia, today? They're practically public enemy number one.
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Aug 13, 2016 17:24
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Volkerball posted:Schizotek, as an abstract principle, I'd agree with you, as your conclusion sounds sensible. But with context and facts, that's very clearly not how things happened in this one specific case. Parle-moi les mots les plus abominables, mon chéri. 
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Aug 13, 2016 17:52
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