Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Bobboau on July 24, 2012, 08:00:18 pm
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RukUetw0hAM
read the top comment.
or read this article if you don't like cryptic riddles (http://www.rt.com/news/iran-computer-virus-acdc-940/)
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I fully support hacking in the name of blasting pure rock awesomeness.
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Nah na-nah nah na-nah nah nah. Apply your own rhythm - it works on two levels. :D
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Nah na-nah nah na-nah nah nah. Apply your own rhythm - it works on two levels. :D
Hey hey, good-bye (to your nuclear ambitions).
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They should just outsource India for tech support. How are their relations with India anyways... oh wait.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RukUetw0hAM
read the top comment.
or read this article if you don't like cryptic riddles (http://www.rt.com/news/iran-computer-virus-acdc-940/)
As an American, with a Physics degree, I'm calling this a backfire. I have a sudden desire to work at an Iranian nuclear facility, so that I might be able to rock all night to the malware planted in the local network. ;)
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Time for the RIAA to sue the CIA and the AEOI for file sharing.
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Unfortunately for RIAA, the military will either be unable to confirm or deny using the music, or will simply deny it.
:p
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because denying filesharing stops lawsuits dead in their tracks.
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Nice, /me likes.
And, well, who would the RIAA sue? The DoD as a whole??
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Somehow I can't see the CIA or the Mossad being the source of malware that plays music. It's not in their best interests to basically hold up a neon sign that says, "HEY GUYS, YOU ARE INFECTED, ROCK ON!"
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Damn! I really would like to know what crosses your mind when you guys read news like this one. USA was the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in combat, the only country to use them TWICE in combat, and the country with the largest, most destructive arsenal. Yet, it is somehow morally acceptable for the USA government to militantly disrupt other country's nuclear research programmes.
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What crosses my mind is that I'm (reasonably) sure that we're not gonna use them now at the drop of a hat, and I can't say the same about certain other countries that have them.
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I think I understand Iran's motives for wanting a nuclear weapon...
Namely, they may be crazy on the political front, but they are not bat-****-crazy like North Korea. Next, with mounting, sustained political pressure from the Western powers, Iran's leaders surely know that if things go truly sour, their military will never stand a chance against the global entities of the world police, or something like that. The only really viable means for them to survive on the political, and thus perhaps even national front, is to either be bullied into doing what the foreign powers want them to, or to bully back with what assumedly amouts to small-scale MAD. A small arsenal is not much, but if you want to deter an attack or invasion, the invader might just do so rather than risk unacceptable amounts of collateral damage.
The question of sanity then comes in the form of them recognizing that having a nuclear weapon or weapons does not make them any safer pushing another power around; in fact, it only makes their position more precarious. I'm not sure they're competant enough to fully understand this latter factor.
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What crosses my mind is that I'm (reasonably) sure that we're not gonna use them now at the drop of a hat, and I can't say the same about certain other countries that have them.
Really? If there is a belligerent and warlike country in this world, that is the USA. Historically, there have only been two reasons why the USA government has not used nuclear weapons yet (apart from the aforementioned instances): Mutually assured destruction, or there being a more cost effective way.
with mounting, sustained political pressure from the Western powers, Iran's leaders surely know that if things go truly sour, their military will never stand a chance against the global entities of the world police, or something like that.
Yes, but why are Western powers pressuring Iran and other countries around the globe? Their reasons (dangerous attitudes, human rights violations, abuse of power), coming from countries with their past and recent history of massive crimes, bullying, and questionable acts, are NOT valid enough. Sadly, economic interests seem like the only reasonable answer.
And don't take me wrong. We have every reason to dislike Iran. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_AMIA_bombing)
The question of sanity then comes in the form of them recognizing that having a nuclear weapon or weapons does not make them any safer pushing another power around; in fact, it only makes their position more precarious.
Judging by the fact that North Korea is still on the map and in their way to develop nuclear weapons despite them being geographically close enough to the USA to easily use them on said country's population, I don't think so.
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Yet, it is somehow morally acceptable for the USA government to militantly disrupt other country's nuclear research programmes.
Why ascribe morality to it? Iran has interests in the Middle East, counter to those of the United States. Iran will be more capable of acting on its interests, with any sort of nuclear arsenal. Therefore the United States acts to hinder Iran's nuclear program. That's the rational actor model, as applied to foreign policy, not morality.
If you do want to map morality to the situation, then the waters get very muddy indeed. What would Iran do with a nuclear arsenal? Would the situation in the Middle East be more morally preferable with a nuclear Iran or without a nuclear Iran? Before answering those questions, don't forget to provide your definition of "morally preferable".
Personally, if I had to cobble together a brief justification for this style of intervention, I would define a morally preferable situation for the Middle East as reducing unnecessary loss of life and increasing the standard of living for the people of the region. I see a nuclear Iran as being capable of using the threat of its nuclear arsenal to ward off possible attackers, while using its conventional military to further its regional foreign policy goals. Past precedent and the rhetoric of Iran's leaders indicate that those regional goals include (in no particular order) seizing oil fields along the Iran-Iraq border, the dissolution of the Israeli government, and the installation of Islamic theocracies in the Middle East (actually the world, but even with nukes, Iran doesn't have that kind of reach). A nuclear Iran could wage conventional war or overtly disrupt ongoing popular uprisings, in order to further those objectives, with less threat of retaliation, due to the looming spectre of a nuclear arsenal, held in reserve. As warfare causes unnecessary loss of life and theocratic rule negatively correlates to standard of living, a nuclear Iran is therefore less morally preferable to a non-nuclear Iran, and measures taken, short of those that Iran would take, if it were to construct a nuclear arsenal, are morally justified.
Incidentally, it was a slightly different question, but I feel like I've trod this ground recently (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=81165.msg1617508#msg1617508).
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Historically, there have only been two reasons why the USA government has not used nuclear weapons yet (apart from the aforementioned instances): Mutually assured destruction, or there being a more cost effective way.
You answered the question there yourself. The US and Russia played the MAD game for decades; they're both intimately familiar with the consequences of the actual use of a nuclear weapon in today's world. That experience directly led to most of the disarmament activities of the past few decades, and makes the use of a nuclear weapon by either power highly unlikely. Yes, there was the odd bit of posturing from Bush and Putin and such, but both parties involved understood it as such, and nothing more. It's in both countries' best interests to make sure the things never get used, and to not have as many of them lying around.
I would love a world completely free of nuclear weapons, but along with getting the existing powers to reduce their stockpiles, there's another core tenet of nonproliferation: making sure that no other states start creating their own stockpiles. That's reason enough to fire Trojans at Iran.
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What crosses my mind is that I'm (reasonably) sure that we're not gonna use them now at the drop of a hat, and I can't say the same about certain other countries that have them.
Really? If there is a belligerent and warlike country in this world, that is the USA. Historically, there have only been two reasons why the USA government has not used nuclear weapons yet (apart from the aforementioned instances): Mutually assured destruction, or there being a more cost effective way.
pretty sure Korea wasn't a more cost effective way, and interestingly enough Truman sacked McArthur for pursuing plans to A-bomb the crap of the far east.
It boils down to "It's not that simple". and please don't generalize America. American Power is like a big hand, but there are many many minds trying to control what direction the hand goes, and those minds certainly don't always agree.
I'm also going to point out that while america has wielded a ton of influence in the past century and a half on the world scale, so did many of the imperial nations, such as Britian, France, Spain, and Germany all at various points. So did the Romans. And the Chinese. and the Japanese. all of these have acted in a "belligerent" manner.
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Yet, it is somehow morally acceptable for the USA government to militantly disrupt other country's nuclear research programmes.
Why ascribe morality to it? Iran has interests in the Middle East, counter to those of the United States. Iran will be more capable of acting on its interests, with any sort of nuclear arsenal. Therefore the United States acts to hinder Iran's nuclear program. That's the rational actor model, as applied to foreign policy, not morality.
Good, that's progress. We can now safely state almost every war the USA has ever waged was because they were defending their interests and not because they were being the good guys and fighting for freedom and rights. I wish the USA government admitted that instead of demonizing countries they don't like, like Venezuela. Now, if the USA were to use the far more civilized commercial, political and diplomatic ways of interacting with other countries instead of waging wars, disrupting research and sponsoring coup d'etats, that would be even better.
If you do want to map morality to the situation, then the waters get very muddy indeed. What would Iran do with a nuclear arsenal?
We don't know. No, what the CNN states Iran would do doesn't counts.
Judging a country's rhetoric now without judging their past and their reasons and motives for acting that way is both unfair and inaccurate.
Of course, nobody wants a nuclear arsenal just to show it to his friends and brag about it, but it's still wrong to automatically assume they would use it at the slightest provocation (and by that way of thinking, every nuclear capable country should be eliminated NOW).
Would the situation in the Middle East be more morally preferable with a nuclear Iran or without a nuclear Iran? Before answering those questions, don't forget to provide your definition of "morally preferable".
I jump the question completely. It's not YOUR job to decide what's morally preferable in the middle east, nor is it mine. There are international organizations whose job is to define that. The difference? I'm not the one advocating unilateral interventionism, you are.
Personally, if I had to cobble together a brief justification for this style of intervention, I would define a morally preferable situation for the Middle East as reducing unnecessary loss of life and increasing the standard of living for the people of the region.
Both being things USA interventions have failed to provide in the long term. In fact, their very interventions have caused a lot more harm that what they have solved, both in Iran and in South America, as evidenced by the fact that this way of reasoning (USA has economic and political interest, so they do whatever they want) is the same that led the USA to partner with Iran to fund the Iranian nuclear program in the first place.
I see a nuclear Iran as being capable of using the threat of its nuclear arsenal to ward off possible attackers, while using its conventional military to further its regional foreign policy goals.
That's precisely what the USA is doing with their own arsenal.
Past precedent and the rhetoric of Iran's leaders
Do you speak Persian? If the answer is no, I would recommend you disregard everything you know about Iran. The government and the media that filter your information have their own agenda. Recently, they blatantly manipulated Hugo Chavez rhetoric to make it look like he was spoiling for a fight, when the truth was quite different (I know. As you may have noticed, I speak both languages fluently enough to notice, and trust me, I don't like Chavez either). I can't find that particular video right now, but it's not the only case by far. I can't even begin to imagine what they say about governments like the Iranian one if they can lie so blatantly about lesser enemies.
indicate that those regional goals include (in no particular order) seizing oil fields along the Iran-Iraq border,
Which by your definition is exactly what the USA wants.
and the installation of Islamic theocracies in the Middle East
As far as I know (and I could be wrong in this), the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people voted to make their country theocratic in a popular referendum. That's democracy at its finest. There's no real reason to jump to the conclusion they would deny the opportunity to decide in the same way to any other country, especially considering how much countries in the middle east like theocracies to begin with. And regarding theocratic governments, it's not the USA job to decide if that's good or bad.
(actually the world, but even with nukes, Iran doesn't have that kind of reach).
Again? You really enjoy constantly making predictions. When and if Iran starts doing something to actually indicate they would pursue this path, I will believe it. Now, there are more urgent things to worry about (like an interventionist superpower running loose).
A nuclear Iran could wage conventional war or overtly disrupt ongoing popular uprisings, in order to further those objectives, with less threat of retaliation, due to the looming spectre of a nuclear arsenal, held in reserve.
And once again, that's precisely what the USA is doing.
As warfare causes unnecessary loss of life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States)
Hardly looks like the USA with its interventionist policies is in a position to worry about the unnecessary losses of war. Again.
and theocratic rule negatively correlates to standard of living
As judged by our Western standards. Then again, we're talking about the USA, a country which has a sizeable portion of their population without health care, and denies their citizens the right of same-sex marriage, so they are hardly in a position to point their fingers at the human rights violations that come associated with a totalitarian theocratic regime.
Meanwhile, Iran has something interesting to say about social rights: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#Government_and_politics)
The political system of the Islamic Republic is based on the 1979 Constitution. Accordingly, it is the duty of the Islamic government to furnish all citizens with equal and appropriate opportunities, to provide them with work, and to satisfy their essential needs, so that the course of their progress may be assured.
Finally, consider this: Since USA intervention in South America (sort of) ended, we've been doing astonishing progress. Before, we were pretty much just like the middle east. I'm starting to wonder what would have happened if the USA had not intervened so much in the middle east and in south america in the first place.
I would love a world completely free of nuclear weapons, but along with getting the existing powers to reduce their stockpiles, there's another core tenet of nonproliferation: making sure that no other states start creating their own stockpiles. That's reason enough to fire Trojans at Iran.
No, it's not. The USA is a major responsible for everything Iran has become. Now they want to use their military might and technological cunning to intervene AGAIN, to worsen the problem even more, to continue with a situation of unfairness. Had the USA let the poor guys alone so many years ago, this wouldn't have happened, and neither would have the AMIA bombings. But back then the USA was intervening to balance some other conflict. And this is time and time again the perfect excuse to do questionable things, because it will make things better. No, it will not. It creates resentment, impoverishes nations, and is just plain wrong.
I'm also going to point out that while america has wielded a ton of influence in the past century and a half on the world scale, so did many of the imperial nations, such as Britian, France, Spain, and Germany all at various points. So did the Romans. And the Chinese. and the Japanese. all of these have acted in a "belligerent" manner.
That's why I also mentioned the "Western powers", and not only the USA. But just because others engaged in objectionable acts doesn't means you're justified to act the same way.
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Oh boy, it's exponentially growing quote war time.
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What crosses my mind is that I'm (reasonably) sure that we're not gonna use them now at the drop of a hat, and I can't say the same about certain other countries that have them.
Really? If there is a belligerent and warlike country in this world, that is the USA. Historically, there have only been two reasons why the USA government has not used nuclear weapons yet (apart from the aforementioned instances): Mutually assured destruction, or there being a more cost effective way.
BS
Post-WWII, if we had been so inclined, it would have been game over for the rest of the world.
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Oh boy, it's exponentially growing quote war time.
Much as I hate line-by-line disections, I think you're right. Case in point:
Now, if the USA were to use the far more civilized commercial, political and diplomatic ways of interacting with other countries...
Iran has been under US sanctions for ages, to no avail. Some nations don't respond to commercial and diplomatic pleas, and on the issue of nuclear weapons development, Iran has been one of those nations. That leaves espionage and/or military action. It's worth noting that the US has been leaning much more heavily on espionage than military action, in this case, utilizing sabotage, rather than caving to Israeli demands to aid in air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.
Judging a country's rhetoric now without judging their past [blah blah blah]
I am absolutely viewing Iran's actions and rhetoric through the lens of their past activities. Iran has a history of funding insurrections against Middle Eastern governments they don't like and providing materiel support to Middle Eastern governments that they do like. They have a history of poking their nose into neighboring countries and disputing territorial boundries, including a military incursion onto Iraqi soil as recently as 2009. As to not trusting cable news translations of the rhetoric spouted by Iran's leadership, even translations from English-speaking supporters of Ahmadinejad indicate that he has a long-term foreign policy goal of overturning the Israeli government and spreading Islamic theocracies. Is the phrasing as strong as it's portrayed in US cable news? Typically no, but the strength of the wording doesn't change the fact that these are the goals of Iran's policy makers.
Of course, nobody wants a nuclear arsenal just to show it to his friends and brag about it, but it's still wrong to automatically assume they would use it at the slightest provocation (and by that way of thinking, every nuclear capable country should be eliminated NOW).
Find the part of my post where I said that Iran would set off a nuclear weapon. You won't find it, because I didn't say it. I said that the presence of an Iranian nuclear arsenal would allow them to more liberally and aggressively use their conventional forces. That is absolutely not an assumption that they would nuke someone/anyone at the slightest provocation.
[Line about defining moral preferability]
I jump the question completely...
You questioned the morality of the United States intervening against Iranian nuclear weapons development, but you've made no case for nonintervention being morally preferable. I'd like to know why you feel that nonintervention is morally preferable to intervention, in this case, and the first step to forming that argument is defining what you feel is morally preferable. If you're not going to form a coherent argument, then you're just engaging in an internet pissing match, in which I have no interest in taking part.
In fact, their very interventions have caused a lot more harm that what they have solved, both in Iran and in South America, as evidenced by the fact that this way of reasoning ... is the same that led the USA to partner with Iran to fund the Iranian nuclear program in the first place.
The program, under which the United States funded Iranian nuclear activities was called "Atoms for Peace" and predated the Iranian revolution, that poisoned US-Iran relations, by twenty-six years. The program was one such that the United States provided technical and logistical support to utilize atomic energy for such terrible activities as generating electricity. It wasn't until after the Iranian Revolution and the cessation of US support that the Iranian government turned the focus of its nuclear research to weapons.
If you want to bag on the US's backfiring arms deals in the Middle East, then I suggest you start another thread about the arming of the Mujahideen or the selling of chemical weapons to Iraq, during the Iran-Iraq war. You can make a really strong argument about where the US has done more harm than good and even shot itself in the foot, but none of it is particularly germane to a discussion about the Iranian nuclear program.
Past precedent and the rhetoric of Iran's leaders indicate that those regional goals include (in no particular order) seizing oil fields along the Iran-Iraq border...
Which by your definition is exactly what the USA wants.
Pardon? What definition did I offer that would indicate that further instability in Iraq is "exactly what the USA wants"? The only definition that I offered was of moral preferability for the political situation in the Middle East, and the definition that I offered pretty clearly favors stability and border integrity. My argument was that a nuclear Iran threatens both, which is why continued sabotage of Iranian nuclear facilities is preferable to total nonintervention.
As far as I know (and I could be wrong in this), the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people voted to make their country theocratic in a popular referendum...
Referendum? Not too many referenda leave thousands dead. The Iranian Revolution was a violent uprising that deposed the monarchy and installed the current theocracy. For as much as you tell me not to trust my knowledge of Iranian history, past and present, you seem to have no knowledge of Iranian history, as the 1979 revolution was one of the four big events that has defined the Middle East in the modern era (the other three being the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 1990 Gulf War, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq).
You really enjoy constantly making predictions.
You can't make any comparison, let alone a moral comparison, of two possible courses of action, without examining the likely consequences of those actions. So, yes, in order to form a coherent position about whether or not US intervention is appropriate with respect to Iran's nuclear program, I had to predict what would happen both with and without intervention.
And yes, Iran's foreign policy, since 1979 has centered around the line, "We shall export our revolution to the whole world."
Hardly looks like the USA with its interventionist policies is in a position to worry about the unnecessary losses of war. Again.
I am not defending every war in which the United States has engaged, nor am I defending an outright war with Iran. The United States has limited its actions against Iran's nuclear program to sabotage, again, despite pressure from Israel to launch military strikes. To my knowledge, Flame and Stuxnet cost no lives, which is a far cry better than the alternative of waiting for Iran to finish a nuclear device to see what they do with it or bombing the facility to see if they retaliate against US and NATO forces in the region.
Additionally, your constant arguing that the United States regularly leverages its nuclear arsenal to let its conventional forces go to war actually makes my point stronger. Iran with a nuclear weapons stockpile will destabilize the Middle East because having a reserve of nuclear weapons is demonstrated to allow a nation's conventional forces to go on the attack. Preventing the development of an Iranian nuke reduces their ability to wage war in the region.
[Standards of living statement]
As judged by our Western standards.
Alright, propose another set of standards and demonstrate that the people of the Middle East are better off by those standards, without the United States preventing the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Since USA intervention in South America (sort of) ended, we've been doing astonishing progress. Before, we were pretty much just like the middle east.
I reject the relevance the parallel between the United States forcing leaders into/out of power in South America and preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Don't conflate my advocacy for sabotaging Iran's nuclear production capacity with an advocacy of a policy of regime change. They're separate issues, and I hold a very different position on one versus the other. In short, stopping nuclear proliferation good; wantonly overturning governments bad.
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I never quite understood why the US insists on making such a big deal about possible nukes in the hands of admittedly scary countries, when there already exists nuclear arsenals in countries like India, Pakistan, Israel, China, France, and the UK.
What people should be more worried about is the possibility of loose nukes within unstable Pakistan, or a miscommunication between the US and Russia resulting in the launch of one of the nuclear weapons that are still in Cold War-style, hair-trigger mode, or some other unlikely-but-still-possible scenario.
The only way to be safe from nuclear weapons is to get rid of them–not just the Iranian one that doesn’t yet exist, but all of them. Unfortunately, it's not a subject anyone wishes to talk about. Our politicians and media alike are happy to continue their war rhetoric. And the notion that Iran can’t be trusted with such a weapon obscures a larger point: given their power to destroy life on a monumental scale, no individual and no government can ultimately be trusted with the bomb.
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The only way to be safe from nuclear weapons is to get rid of them
And a ban starts at effective control of allowing access. Until we can effectively prevent any given country (Iran, or anyone else) from developing nuclear weapons, disarmament is completely impractical.
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My entire knowledge of world politics is provided by These Blokes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHynEnz-X_4).
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I love how we're arguing morality in this thread, as if being morally just will somehow keep bad things from happening.
This is the real world. Grow up. The moral high ground is a public relations tool, not good policy in and of itself.
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The only way to be safe from nuclear weapons is to get rid of them
And a ban starts at effective control of allowing access. Until we can effectively prevent any given country (Iran, or anyone else) from developing nuclear weapons, disarmament is completely impractical.
Disarmament is completely impossible until we actually start talking about nuclear proliferation again. Just focusing our attention on 'rogue nations' won't solve the problem.
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disarmament is completely impossible PERIOD. that cat's out of the bag. even if we could magically gather up every warhead on the planet and toss them into the sun, there is nothing to stop the creation of more. that knowledge exists, and cannot be wiped from existence.
this was a bad idea. :warp:
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I maybe won't be so absolute about it being COMPLETELY impossible, just in case you end up being like the various naysayers throughout history that claimed something was impossible before someone actually accomplishes it.
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Our own Nuke will be the man to rid this world or nuclear armaments...by detonating them all.
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I love how we're arguing morality in this thread, as if being morally just will somehow keep bad things from happening.
This is the real world. Grow up. The moral high ground is a public relations tool, not good policy in and of itself.
Are Israel and the US still planning to stop Iran by attacking uranium enrichment centers and nuclear power plants? If so, should we be worried about the potential collateral damage that would occur or would there be none? I've seen some graphics (tried to find, no success) on what was thought would be the effect (they estimated 3 million Iranians would suffer or die from the heavy fallout and subsequent pollution). If bombing nuclear reactors, which are now loaded, and it would cause such collateral damage, would that be an acceptable price to pay for peace? Would an invasion of Iran still follow, seeing as the Iranians might want to retaliate and still remain a threat for stability?
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So, ignoring the entire post's worth of leading questions, and continuing on:
Iran straddles that unfortunate line where, once they have a nuclear weapon, they're insane or short-sighted enough to want to actually use it. If it gets used, which, considering the country in question, is significantly more likely than any time since WW2, many more than 3 million would die, considering retaliatory strikes. Iran as a political entity would cease to exist.
Even if the reactors explode (which they shouldn't), and even if the fallout is distributed in the worst possible case (which it shouldn't), three million now is better than fifty million in a few years. The moral high ground is great when you can realistically gain advantage from it. If you can't gain advantage from it, it's a liability.
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Oh ****. That sounds like the reasoning used to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, how many times does the US get thanked for nuking Japan into submission instead of resorting to crude fire-bombing and ground assaults that would have possibly cost 5x more lives for both sides??
Problem is, people can't see the forest for the trees. "ZOMGWTFBBQNUUUUUKESS555!!!111 --- CNN sez theezRbad!!"
Which, don't get me wrong, if Iran got them, they most likely would be. North Korea has enough self-preservation instinct to be deterred by the surety of complete and total decimation if they launched nukes at South Korea instead of just steamrolling down their with their Soviet tanks like they did last time. I'm pretty sure all they would do with nukes is a) extort money and b) sell them for money ... which could be just as bad if they sold them to the wrong people.
Iran... well, FFS, if someone believes the only way they are assured a pleasant afterlife is to die in battle, and has a proclivity to act on said beliefs, what would possess you to stop at anything short of genocide to prevent them from getting a Weapon of Mass Destruction?
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...How many conventional warheads does Iran have, anyway? Between Iran's stockpile of conventional Sunburn and Onyx missiles, and Iran's 1332 lb rocket artillery warheads, the US Navy is in for a world of hurt if they move into the potential shooting gallery that is the Strait of Hormuz.
Ship defense systems like the Aegis currently in use can stop the Sunburn 95% of the time, but such testing was done in open seas, and the Strait doesn’t allow for the normal defense in depth available in open seas. US warplanes just aren't going to be able to spot and destroy every single missile platform, especially when you consider that the Sunburn can be launched from a platform as simple as a flatbed truck.
Still eager to see a US invasion of Iran?
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Why don't we all agree that if ANY major nation invades another en force, everyone involved is in for a world of hurt due to the arms each has to hand.
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Somehow I can't see the CIA or the Mossad being the source of malware that plays music. It's not in their best interests to basically hold up a neon sign that says, "HEY GUYS, YOU ARE INFECTED, ROCK ON!"
This bears repeating.
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So, ignoring the entire post's worth of leading questions, and continuing on:
Iran straddles that unfortunate line where, once they have a nuclear weapon, they're insane or short-sighted enough to want to actually use it. If it gets used, which, considering the country in question, is significantly more likely than any time since WW2, many more than 3 million would die, considering retaliatory strikes. Iran as a political entity would cease to exist.
Even if the reactors explode (which they shouldn't), and even if the fallout is distributed in the worst possible case (which it shouldn't), three million now is better than fifty million in a few years. The moral high ground is great when you can realistically gain advantage from it. If you can't gain advantage from it, it's a liability.
That's quite an ugly calculus, I personally would consider Iran much less of a threat than is presented in western media. Thanks for your response though, interesting to hear how much you value the lives of so many others.
Personally I wouldn't consider Iran much of a threat at all for anyone, they're on a defensive being threatened constantly for at least four years, or perhaps even going back to the Iran Contra. They weren't involved with aggressive wars as far as I know for quite some time. Also the WMD scare has been used before with Iraq, which turned out not completely true.
But in the end the truth is somewhere in between or completely lost so it's always based on interpretations and limited information.
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It might be ugly, but it's not wrong. Three million now is better than 50 million in a few years. Add to that, a country's citizens are always worth more to it than another country's citizens are (if they're not, there's something wrong). Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something. Iran's three million projected dead (which I still doubt) are worth much less to the Israeli government than a few hundred thousand of their own. The same is true in the reverse.
Again, welcome to the real world.
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So, ignoring the entire post's worth of leading questions, and continuing on:
Iran straddles that unfortunate line where, once they have a nuclear weapon, they're insane or short-sighted enough to want to actually use it. If it gets used, which, considering the country in question, is significantly more likely than any time since WW2, many more than 3 million would die, considering retaliatory strikes. Iran as a political entity would cease to exist.
Even if the reactors explode (which they shouldn't), and even if the fallout is distributed in the worst possible case (which it shouldn't), three million now is better than fifty million in a few years. The moral high ground is great when you can realistically gain advantage from it. If you can't gain advantage from it, it's a liability.
That's quite an ugly calculus, I personally would consider Iran much less of a threat than is presented in western media. Thanks for your response though, interesting to hear how much you value the lives of so many others.
Personally I wouldn't consider Iran much of a threat at all for anyone, they're on a defensive being threatened constantly for at least four years, or perhaps even going back to the Iran Contra. They weren't involved with aggressive wars as far as I know for quite some time. Also the WMD scare has been used before with Iraq, which turned out not completely true.
But in the end the truth is somewhere in between or completely lost so it's always based on interpretations and limited information.
:yes: to this.
I'll be elaborating a longer reply to the arguments later. I'm a little too busy right now.
Also, @Scotty, I'm ignoring your posts from now on, on the basis that I've decided it's not worth the time.
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Add to that, a country's citizens are always worth more to it than another country's citizens are (if they're not, there's something wrong).
If another country's citizens are worth more then one's own, then won't the winning move for the US be to not get involved at all? The Islamic Belt is surrounded by some pretty tough neighbors - India, China, Russia. And they are much more exposed to Islamic Terror then the US is, what with the protection our oceans gives us. If we were to pull out from the middle east, those countries would have to respond to supposed military threats from Iran themselves, and all three of those countries not only possess nuclear capability, but are also far stronger economically then Iran is.
Not that I would accuse the US government of any kind of rationality, mind you. I am sincerely beginning to doubt that US citizens are actually worth much to our government, which according to your logic begs the question of what exactly is wrong and whom they are concerned about.
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I've seen some graphics (tried to find, no success) on what was thought would be the effect (they estimated 3 million Iranians would suffer or die from the heavy fallout and subsequent pollution).
This is bull****.
Ship defense systems like the Aegis currently in use can stop the Sunburn 95% of the time, but such testing was done in open seas,
This is also bull****. In fact, much of the post is, for the simple reason that you're proposing absolutely nothing was learned from the Great Scud Hunt of '91. That is most definitely not the case.
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I've seen some graphics (tried to find, no success) on what was thought would be the effect (they estimated 3 million Iranians would suffer or die from the heavy fallout and subsequent pollution).
This is bull****.
Ship defense systems like the Aegis currently in use can stop the Sunburn 95% of the time, but such testing was done in open seas, and the Strait doesn’t allow for the normal defense in depth available in open seas.
This is also bull****. In fact, much of the post is, for the simple reason that you're proposing absolutely nothing was learned from the Great Scud Hunt of '91. That is most definitely not the case.
Care to elaborate a bit on both points?
A quick internet search leads me to believe that during the Gulf War, Coalition forces sorely underestimated Iraq's SCUD missiles, and that they did not properly learn anything from Operation Crossbow and Hitler's V-1/V-2 rockets.
Cruise missiles are capable of tremendous political impact regardless of how much physical damage they actually do.
Feel free to refute these points, but please explain why you feel they are inaccurate.
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This conversation seems to be jumping around quite a lot, chiefly because there seem to be people who don't understand the difference between sabotaging a facility by injecting specialized malware into their local network and launching a full-scale military invasion of Iran.
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This conversation seems to be jumping around quite a lot, chiefly because there seem to be people who don't understand the difference between sabotaging a facility by injecting specialized malware into their local network and launching a full-scale military invasion of Iran.
Imagine how bad this thread would be if the malware RickRoll'd the Iranians?
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Iran... well, FFS, if someone believes the only way they are assured a pleasant afterlife is to die in battle, and has a proclivity to act on said beliefs
Muslims are not Klingons.
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Care to elaborate a bit on both points?
A quick internet search leads me to believe that during the Gulf War, Coalition forces sorely underestimated Iraq's SCUD missiles, and that they did not properly learn anything from Operation Crossbow and Hitler's V-1/V-2 rockets.
Cruise missiles are capable of tremendous political impact regardless of how much physical damage they actually do.
Feel free to refute these points, but please explain why you feel they are inaccurate.
This would be wrong on both counts. (Indeed, the Crossbow reference is particularly bad.) Nobody underestimated the SCUD, they were quite well-known. What was underestimated was the willingness of the Iraqis to use them badly. (The accuracy of a SCUD-type weapon is directly proportional to how long you spend mensurating and preparing the missile in a launch position; you can elevate and launch in under thirty minutes only at the cost of a Circular Error Probable that balloons to larger than most major cities. If the cycle is less than five minutes, you might be lucky to hit the right country. On the other hand, a SCUD in an elevated position is a massive and distinctive radar target and unless you launch rapidly aircraft can and will be vectored to attack you.) In the end a huge amount of effort was diverted in an attempt to find and kill, or at least suppress, the SCUD launchers over ultimately political concerns.
Much of this effort was wasted, because of an inability to provide continuous coverage surveillance. The Great Scud Hunt of '91 is in many ways the genesis of more modern network-centric warfare technology and the modern UAV/UCAV. Both existed beforehand but received a huge boost because they offered a solution to this sort of problem; only afterwards did it become obvious how useful they were in general.
The idea that Iran would be completely able to close off the straight of Hormuz with cruise missiles is predicated on the inability to find and kill the launch platforms and targeting ability from the air. (The Sunburn, Styx, and Silkworm that compose most of these batteries are fairly short-ranged, giving them a limited area from which they can be launched, and require external targeting data for accurate attacks; ships are not cities, they move.) The United States has spent the last two decades investing in systems and platform which give it the ability to solve the Great Scud Hunt problem, and this one as well.
Re: AEGIS. The AEGIS figure is misleading, as it quotes a single AEGIS' ability to kill a single inbound with a single missile. (And the majority of live-fire exercises in recent years have been against simulated ballistic inbounds, which are significantly harder targets than cruise missiles.) A live-fire test of the system for the threat it's designed against under wartime conditions has never been conducted because it would be hideously expensive to fire off seventy-odd SM2s, never mind the thirty-odd target drones you'd need, and if you start tying ships of a battlegroup together it gets worse.
AEGIS is designed to link with other ships and with airborne and land-based assets (both varieties of AWACS and the Army's Patriot system can be tied in with AEGIS), first, expanding its detection radius and lowering detection threshold both by comparing sensor data. Second, under wartime conditions, the system will launch multiple missiles per target (shoot-shoot-look) and will make multiple efforts to kill an inbound if the first fails. Third, AEGIS was designed to originally handle the multi-regiment Backfire raid and actually works better when presented with multiple threats instead of one. Fourth, it's hardly the first or last line of defense. An inbound missile must surmount CAP, shipboard SAMs, shipboard and aerial jamming, chaff clouds, and point defenses. Most of Iran's antiship missiles are getting long in the tooth and their operational characteristics are well-known, making them easier to spoof or kill. They were also designed before the era when stealth was even moderately understood, so it's possible they'd have real trouble recognizing some of the more modern ships like the Burkes as targets worthy of attack.
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Iran... well, FFS, if someone believes the only way they are assured a pleasant afterlife is to die in battle, and has a proclivity to act on said beliefs
Muslims are not Klingons.
Radical Muslims are.
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What crosses my mind is that I'm (reasonably) sure that we're not gonna use them now at the drop of a hat, and I can't say the same about certain other countries that have them.
Really? If there is a belligerent and warlike country in this world, that is the USA. Historically, there have only been two reasons why the USA government has not used nuclear weapons yet (apart from the aforementioned instances): Mutually assured destruction, or there being a more cost effective way.
BS
Post-WWII, if we had been so inclined, it would have been game over for the rest of the world.
And for you too. I did mentioned Mutually Assured Destruction as one of the main deterrents.
Iran has been under US sanctions for ages, to no avail. Some nations don't respond to commercial and diplomatic pleas, and on the issue of nuclear weapons development, Iran has been one of those nations. That leaves espionage and/or military action. It's worth noting that the US has been leaning much more heavily on espionage than military action, in this case, utilizing sabotage, rather than caving to Israeli demands to aid in air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.
So we should all thank the USA because at least this time they decided to intervene in the least brutal and aggressive way. I have a better plan: stay away from other regions.
Judging a country's rhetoric now without judging their past [blah blah blah]
Now this is disrespectful and distasteful. My words are NOT blah blah blah, sir. Agree with them, disagree with them, but don't be so condescending with me, or anyone else, if you expect to be taken seriously. This is the kind of arrogance that prevents you from actually understanding my views, regardless of whether you agree with them or not.
Perhaps you have to feel the pressure of being constantly bullied by a foreign power to understand the frustration. Perhaps you have to live under the pressure of a foreign country that removes a good president you elected time and time again to change him for a puppet that gives away every chance of development to understand why nations can become so aggressive. Perhaps then you wouldn't consider this blah blah blah. But you will never understand how others think if you don't even take the chance to read about it. I ****ing learned your language to be able to communicate with you so I could understand better what kind of mentality conceives as reasonable and justifiable acts like these (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment). Actually, I guess I should have known that would turn out to be a mistake beforehand. What was I expecting?
Iran has a history of funding insurrections against Middle Eastern governments they don't like and providing materiel support to Middle Eastern governments that they do like.
That's surely another thing they learned from the USA and the other world powers, after said countries actively and constantly intervened in their internal affairs throughout most of their recent history. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iran#Qajar_dynasty_.281796.E2.80.931925.29)
They have a history of poking their nose into neighboring countries and disputing territorial boundries, including a military incursion onto Iraqi soil as recently as 2009.
Hypocrisy at its height. I'm not even going to say, for the heaven-knows-how-many time, the same thing again.
As to not trusting cable news translations of the rhetoric spouted by Iran's leadership, even translations from English-speaking supporters of Ahmadinejad indicate that he has a long-term foreign policy goal of overturning the Israeli government and spreading Islamic theocracies.
Nice try. Grab on an example I provided as a justification to ignore my two main points:
1- Western media lies.
2- Ultimately, you have no right to even consider intervention. No, I'm not talking about bad intervention, worse intervention, or even (by our standards) good intervention. I'm talking about intervention. Period.
Find the part of my post where I said that Iran would set off a nuclear weapon. You won't find it, because I didn't say it. I said that the presence of an Iranian nuclear arsenal would allow them to more liberally and aggressively use their conventional forces. That is absolutely not an assumption that they would nuke someone/anyone at the slightest provocation.
True, you're right. I was wrong in jumping to this conclusion from your post. And it actually makes a lot more sense for Iran to use their hypothetical future nuclear weapons that way.
You questioned the morality of the United States intervening against Iranian nuclear weapons development, but you've made no case for nonintervention being morally preferable. I'd like to know why you feel that nonintervention is morally preferable to intervention, in this case, and the first step to forming that argument is defining what you feel is morally preferable. If you're not going to form a coherent argument, then you're just engaging in an internet pissing match, in which I have no interest in taking part.
I will NOT give you a reason why I feel that nonintervention is morally preferable to intervention in this case. I've already told you so. However, I will give you a (more or less complete) summed up set of reasons for why I think intervention is both morally objectionable and impractical in the long term in almost every case, including this one:
- Cultural differences in most cases make neutral intervention impossible, which is a requirement for the intervention to be fair. For example, you stated as a fact that theocracy harms quality of life in the middle east, while I'm pretty sure most middle easterners would believe otherwise. Yet you persist on the arrogance of telling them how they should feel about their own governments.
- Past history of abuses and misunderstandings make most interventions a further offense.
- Intervention, if it were to be allowed (which I find abhorrent and will oppose anyway unless we're talking about really serious things actually happening, instead of hypothetical FUD), would have to be performed by someone with a history that is not thoroughly polluted with acts that favoured said party's interest over the interests of the intervened parties. Someone who can at least claim neutrality, at least approximate neutrality, considering true neutrality on such subjects is ultimately impossible. You have pretty much admitted for most all cases around the world, that's not the USA.
- And last but not least, interventions that occurred in the past have led to this situation. Interventions will NOT solve them. At much, they will oppress the intervened, with the net result of just hiding the problem under the carpet while it silently keeps growing deeply in the collective memories of the intervened.
The program, under which the United States funded Iranian nuclear activities was called "Atoms for Peace" and predated the Iranian revolution, that poisoned US-Iran relations, by twenty-six years. The program was one such that the United States provided technical and logistical support to utilize atomic energy for such terrible activities as generating electricity. It wasn't until after the Iranian Revolution and the cessation of US support that the Iranian government turned the focus of its nuclear research to weapons.
Nice way of failing to mention that the USA sponsored the coup d'etat that in 1953 overthrew the democratic government and installed a pro-Western Powers dictator in its place. Atoms for Peace helped build the first nuclear reactor in Iran after the coup. "But that was good intervention!" I hear you say. Well, if it would have been good by the standards of the Iranians, he (or his kind) would still be in power.
And get this into your mind please, sponsoring a coup d'etat IS VIEWED as a hostile act by the locals. I don't care if it seems perfectly normal or justifiable to you. You blame the sole incident that caused the strain in relationships, but what you fail to see is that anti-americanism is not suddenly materialized, it TAKES a reason for the majority of a population to hate the USA so much, and that reason is usually unilateral interventionism for the sake of USA's own interests, at the expense of everything else.
One more thing: The AMIA bombing is believed to be closely related to this. When the US withdrew from the program and tried to enact an embargo on enriched uranium to serve as fuel to Iran, Argentina's CNEA negotiated an agreement by which we would provide Iran with reactors that could work with low-enriched uranium (the kind of reactors we used to build at the time), and provide them with said uranium. CNEA is one of the most renowned developers of nuclear technology for peaceful uses, whose only stain was during the (yes, USA and Europe backed) brutal last military dictatorship. This transfer would have made the region MUCH safer, depriving Iran of a valid excuse to enrich uranium in the first place. That is, if the USA had actually been interested in making the region safer. Guess who pressured us out of the agreement. Yes, you guessed, it was the USA. The bombing is believed to be a retaliation. 86 deaths and more than 300 injured. Nice work right there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran#Post-revolution.2C_1979.E2.80.931989 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran#Post-revolution.2C_1979.E2.80.931989)
"The United States cut off the supply of highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel for the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, which forced the reactor to shut down for a number of years, until Argentina's National Atomic Energy Commission in 1987–88 signed an agreement with Iran to help in converting the reactor from highly enriched uranium fuel to 19.75% low-enriched uranium, and to supply the low-enriched uranium to Iran.[60] The uranium was delivered in 1993.[61]"
And later:
"According to a report by the Argentine justice in 2006, during the late 1980s and early 1990s the US pressured Argentina to terminate its nuclear cooperation with Iran, and from early 1992 to 1994 negotiations between Argentina and Iran took place with the aim of re-establishing the three agreements made in 1987–88."
Pardon? What definition did I offer that would indicate that further instability in Iraq is "exactly what the USA wants"? The only definition that I offered was of moral preferability for the political situation in the Middle East, and the definition that I offered pretty clearly favors stability and border integrity. My argument was that a nuclear Iran threatens both, which is why continued sabotage of Iranian nuclear facilities is preferable to total nonintervention.
No. I said the USA has an interest in regulating oil prices and getting hold of oil reserves in the middle east. And since by your definition when we started this discussion, it's justifiable for a nation acting solely on their own interests to commit otherwise objectionable acts, because there's no such thing as a valid moral frame, then the conclusion is both logical and obvious.
Referendum? Not too many referenda leave thousands dead. The Iranian Revolution was a violent uprising that deposed the monarchy and installed the current theocracy. For as much as you tell me not to trust my knowledge of Iranian history, past and present, you seem to have no knowledge of Iranian history, as the 1979 revolution was one of the four big events that has defined the Middle East in the modern era (the other three being the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 1990 Gulf War, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq).
And yes, Iran's foreign policy, since 1979 has centered around the line, "We shall export our revolution to the whole world."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution#Referendum_of_12_Farvardin
As I've already admitted, I could be wrong in this somewhere, since I really didn't know about this referendum or many other things until a couple of days ago. But reading through a lot of Iranian history from what I consider trusted sources (hint: they're not the traditional western media), I've come to the conclusion they have every right to do what they're doing as long as they stick to their region and don't end up actually developing nuclear weapons (and no, I don't care if the CNN says they're doing it, I want actual, irrefutable, unambiguous proof). And if they're nuts, as with so many other wackos around, its our oh-so-morally-high-and-mighty-western-interventionists' fault, as usual.
I am not defending every war in which the United States has engaged, nor am I defending an outright war with Iran. The United States has limited its actions against Iran's nuclear program to sabotage, again, despite pressure from Israel to launch military strikes. To my knowledge, Flame and Stuxnet cost no lives, which is a far cry better than the alternative of waiting for Iran to finish a nuclear device to see what they do with it or bombing the facility to see if they retaliate against US and NATO forces in the region.
Again, so we should be thanking the USA for being so magnanimous as to limit itself to using only lesser evils to intervene in someone else's affairs. No, thanks, I'm expecting better.
Iran with a nuclear weapons stockpile will destabilize the Middle East because having a reserve of nuclear weapons is demonstrated to allow a nation's conventional forces to go on the attack. Preventing the development of an Iranian nuke reduces their ability to wage war in the region.
And you once again disregard the basis of my argument. It's NOT our job to define if Iran has a right to wage war with some other country in the region. That region is so ****ed up already thanks to us westerners that anything we do will only worsen the problem. Let THEM decide their destiny. We have no bussines being in there. You have no business being in there. I don't care if the USA thinks they're doing the "good" thing (which you already have admitted they don't anyways), get out of there.
Alright, propose another set of standards and demonstrate that the people of the Middle East are better off by those standards, without the United States preventing the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Wrong. Wrong. WRONG. My whole argument is that THEY should decide their standards, not us. THEY. I will NOT indulge in the arrogance and ignorance of telling them what their standards should be.
I reject the relevance the parallel between the United States forcing leaders into/out of power in South America and preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Don't conflate my advocacy for sabotaging Iran's nuclear production capacity with an advocacy of a policy of regime change. They're separate issues, and I hold a very different position on one versus the other. In short, stopping nuclear proliferation good; wantonly overturning governments bad.
They ARE the same. They are two sides of the same coin. Just another strategy of intervention the USA and other powers use to further their own agenda. Just another strategy that causes more problems that they solve. Just another way to screw up with the world for their own interests.
The only way to be safe from nuclear weapons is to get rid of them–not just the Iranian one that doesn’t yet exist, but all of them. Unfortunately, it's not a subject anyone wishes to talk about. Our politicians and media alike are happy to continue their war rhetoric. And the notion that Iran can’t be trusted with such a weapon obscures a larger point: given their power to destroy life on a monumental scale, no individual and no government can ultimately be trusted with the bomb.
Disarmament is completely impossible until we actually start talking about nuclear proliferation again. Just focusing our attention on 'rogue nations' won't solve the problem.
I maybe won't be so absolute about it being COMPLETELY impossible, just in case you end up being like the various naysayers throughout history that claimed something was impossible before someone actually accomplishes it.
You, sir, seem like a reasonable person. Incidentally, your title suggest an hispanic origin. What country are you from? That is, if you don't mind telling us.
Iran... well, FFS, if someone believes the only way they are assured a pleasant afterlife is to die in battle, and has a proclivity to act on said beliefs, what would possess you to stop at anything short of genocide to prevent them from getting a Weapon of Mass Destruction?
But jr2, if a world power thinks they have a right to do whatever they want if it's in its interests, and has a proclivity to act on said belief, what would possess said country to stop at anything short of genocide to prevent them from getting whatever they want?
Yes, the danger of states like Iran possessing nuclear weapons ARE high. But there's a greater, actual danger NOW, instead of a hypothetical one in the future.
This conversation seems to be jumping around quite a lot, chiefly because there seem to be people who don't understand the difference between sabotaging a facility by injecting specialized malware into their local network and launching a full-scale military invasion of Iran.
Both are aggressions to another country, and the USA has demonstrated in the past that when they agitate the Weapons of Mass Destruction ghost, military intervention is just around the corner.
Iran... well, FFS, if someone believes the only way they are assured a pleasant afterlife is to die in battle, and has a proclivity to act on said beliefs
Muslims are not Klingons.
Radical Muslims are.
Meanwhile, south here, many of us see the average American as a mixture of the worse traits Ferengi, Cardassians and Klingons have to offer.
I'll stay with the Klingons for the moment, thanks.
Also, I don't think I will be replying anymore to this thread, or at least not in this elaborated way. I'm too busy in these days and I think I've already obtained all the information I wanted to finally solve my mental puzzle about the American population's way of reasoning.
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Because the occupants of this forum represent the entire American population. Riiiight.
That aside, I'm filled with this curious mixture of amusement and disappointment when I read your post. The idea that not acting in a country's best interests is somehow conducive to an effective governance is laughable at best.
Morals and morality are generally beneficial for individuals. Morals and morality are not as generally beneficial for states. The moral high ground is a public relations tool. Treating it as anything else is wishful thinking. Doing "the right thing" from a moral standpoint is a very easy way to drive a country into the ground, both domestic and abroad.
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This would be wrong on both counts. (Indeed, the Crossbow reference is particularly bad.) Nobody underestimated the SCUD, they were quite well-known. What was underestimated was the willingness of the Iraqis to use them badly. (The accuracy of a SCUD-type weapon is directly proportional to how long you spend mensurating and preparing the missile in a launch position; you can elevate and launch in under thirty minutes only at the cost of a Circular Error Probable that balloons to larger than most major cities. If the cycle is less than five minutes, you might be lucky to hit the right country. On the other hand, a SCUD in an elevated position is a massive and distinctive radar target and unless you launch rapidly aircraft can and will be vectored to attack you.) In the end a huge amount of effort was diverted in an attempt to find and kill, or at least suppress, the SCUD launchers over ultimately political concerns.
Much of this effort was wasted, because of an inability to provide continuous coverage surveillance. The Great Scud Hunt of '91 is in many ways the genesis of more modern network-centric warfare technology and the modern UAV/UCAV. Both existed beforehand but received a huge boost because they offered a solution to this sort of problem; only afterwards did it become obvious how useful they were in general.
The idea that Iran would be completely able to close off the straight of Hormuz with cruise missiles is predicated on the inability to find and kill the launch platforms and targeting ability from the air. (The Sunburn, Styx, and Silkworm that compose most of these batteries are fairly short-ranged, giving them a limited area from which they can be launched, and require external targeting data for accurate attacks; ships are not cities, they move.) The United States has spent the last two decades investing in systems and platform which give it the ability to solve the Great Scud Hunt problem, and this one as well.
Re: AEGIS. The AEGIS figure is misleading, as it quotes a single AEGIS' ability to kill a single inbound with a single missile. (And the majority of live-fire exercises in recent years have been against simulated ballistic inbounds, which are significantly harder targets than cruise missiles.) A live-fire test of the system for the threat it's designed against under wartime conditions has never been conducted because it would be hideously expensive to fire off seventy-odd SM2s, never mind the thirty-odd target drones you'd need, and if you start tying ships of a battlegroup together it gets worse.
AEGIS is designed to link with other ships and with airborne and land-based assets (both varieties of AWACS and the Army's Patriot system can be tied in with AEGIS), first, expanding its detection radius and lowering detection threshold both by comparing sensor data. Second, under wartime conditions, the system will launch multiple missiles per target (shoot-shoot-look) and will make multiple efforts to kill an inbound if the first fails. Third, AEGIS was designed to originally handle the multi-regiment Backfire raid and actually works better when presented with multiple threats instead of one. Fourth, it's hardly the first or last line of defense. An inbound missile must surmount CAP, shipboard SAMs, shipboard and aerial jamming, chaff clouds, and point defenses. Most of Iran's antiship missiles are getting long in the tooth and their operational characteristics are well-known, making them easier to spoof or kill. They were also designed before the era when stealth was even moderately understood, so it's possible they'd have real trouble recognizing some of the more modern ships like the Burkes as targets worthy of attack.
Information source, may I ask? A quick google search (http://www.google.com/search?q=Sunburn+Missile) reveals dozens upon dozens of articles that mostly back up my claims.
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You can get a good history of the Great Scud Hunt and the problems attendant to it from Desert Victory, which was written shortly after the war. The difficulties of the SCUDs can be found in many places; wikipedia, specialist publications, and others.
Other stuff is based on conversations with current and former naval personnel and civilian employees of the Navy (an area in which I am admittedly blessed as many friends of the family formerly worked for SPAWAR and other systems commands), specialist publications I have access to scattered around the office for the customers (Proceedings of the Naval Institute for starters).
Other stuff is publicly available. The design, range, and in-service dates of the Styx (the '50s), Silkworm (Styx clone) and Sunburn are available off wikipedia. So is the fact the Sunburn isn't in service with Iran! The nature of testing of AEGIS is a matter of public record. AEGIS' design date and the existing threats then make if obvious what it was designed to combat; the bit about the low radar signature of a Burke would be painfully obvious to anyone who's ever been aboard one (seriously, they designed the deck stanchions triangular, there are only so many reasons to do that).
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Oh dear, it looks like I need to set fire to some strawmen.
No. I said the USA has an interest in regulating oil prices and getting hold of oil reserves in the middle east. And since by your definition when we started this discussion, it's justifiable for a nation acting solely on their own interests to commit otherwise objectionable acts, because there's no such thing as a valid moral frame, then the conclusion is both logical and obvious.
You're conflating two separate points. The first bit of my first reply to you was pointing out that, entirely setting aside morality, the United States' actions against Iran's nuclear program were rational, which does not always equate to moral. It was from the following paragraph on that I constructed a moral justification for US intervention in Iran's nuclear program.
Now this is disrespectful and distasteful.
I show the same respect that I am shown. You assumed that I was ignorant of the history of the region and blathered on, based on that assumption. Quoting the rest would have served only to make a long post longer.
For example, you stated as a fact that theocracy harms quality of life in the middle east, while I'm pretty sure most middle easterners would believe otherwise. Yet you persist on the arrogance of telling them how they should feel about their own governments.
"...theocratic rule negatively correlates to standard of living..." does not equal "...you stated as a fact that theocracy harms quality of life in the middle east..."
Neither have I stated how people should feel about their own government. Note again, I am not advocating for regime change in Iran. I am advocating for a policy that would reduce Iran's ability to force their form of government on neighboring nations. Again, sabotaging nuclear enrichment facilities is not the same as a whole-hog invasion, and you are being incredibly dishonest to try to turn my advocacy of one into advocacy of both.
My whole argument is that THEY should decide their standards, not us. THEY. I will NOT indulge in the arrogance and ignorance of telling them what their standards should be.
Then articulate what Middle Eastern standards are, under which the region is better off with a nuclear Iran. If you fail to do that, then your advocacy of nonintervention with respect to Iran's nuclear weapons program is as wrong-headed and arrogant as you say my advocacy of intervention is, because you're saying that because US intervention harmed your region of the world, then it harms all regions of the world.
I've come to the conclusion they have every right to do what they're doing as long as they stick to their region and don't end up actually developing nuclear weapons (and no, I don't care if the CNN says they're doing it, I want actual, irrefutable, unambiguous proof).
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2011/gov2011-65.pdf
I had intended to pull select quotes from this IAEA report, detailing why the international community has arrived at the conclusion that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon. Unfortunately, reproducing about 40% of the document would, again, make a long post even longer. The report details all of Iran's declared nuclear activities, investigates reports of their undeclared nuclear activities, and compiles a lovely timeline of Iran's nuclear weapon program from the 1980's to the report's date of publication. It additionally points out where Iran has been in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory (hence why the IAEA inspects Iran's nuclear facilities and programs), providing a legal justification for other signatory states to intervene in Iran's nuclear program.
Further, don't bash me for citing CNN/the evil Western media (which I haven't done, though apparently another strawman you've constructed has), when the only citations you bring to the table are Wikipedia articles, which are collectively written by laypersons from the Western world.
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The sunburn isn't in service to Iran? Wikipedia begs to differ - it specifically lists Iran as one of the countries currently operating the missile. How dated is your information about which countries use the Sunburn missile?
The USS Stark incident come to mind when talking about warships that are supposed to be able to shoot down incoming missiles.
But at this point I am trying to figure out what is true and what is just war propaganda - the story of the Sunburn missile being a major threat to the US navy seems to originate from the Iranian government + media. It's probably fair to assume that both sides are engaged in propaganda to some degree, and the most likely reality is somewhere in between.
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The sunburn isn't in service to Iran? Wikipedia begs to differ - it specifically lists Iran as one of the countries currently operating the missile. How dated is your information about which countries use the Sunburn missile?
Uh. Check the page here. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-270_Moskit)
Unless you're referring to the other missile lumped under the Sunburn title. The P-80 is a considerably lower-performance weapon. (Curiously wikipedia doesn't even seem to have a page on it, the "main article" page is a redlink.)
The USS Stark incident come to mind when talking about warships that are supposed to be able to shoot down incoming missiles.
Because a comparison from the '80s talking about an incident that was not wartime and a ship of considerably lesser capabilities than anything modern, operating alone, is a terribly valid comparison. Don't get me wrong, I love the old Perrys as a class and I'd take them over the LCS, but the Stark incident is hardly comparable for a multitude of reasons. A lone dedicated convoy escort vs. a mistaken attack from a group we weren't even at the time fighting (the entire tanker reflagging incident series was fought against Iran, Iraqi aircraft attacked the Stark) vs. a modern surface action or carrier battlegroup at war against a known threat.
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Unless you're referring to the other missile lumped under the Sunburn title. The P-80 is a considerably lower-performance weapon. (Curiously wikipedia doesn't even seem to have a page on it, the "main article" page is a redlink.)
Here you go. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-N-22) Granted, this is wikipedia, it has been known to be inaccurate from time to time.
Because a comparison from the '80s talking about an incident that was not wartime and a ship of considerably lesser capabilities than anything modern, operating alone, is a terribly valid comparison. Don't get me wrong, I love the old Perrys as a class and I'd take them over the LCS, but the Stark incident is hardly comparable for a multitude of reasons. A lone dedicated convoy escort vs. a mistaken attack from a group we weren't even at the time fighting (the entire tanker reflagging incident series was fought against Iran, Iraqi aircraft attacked the Stark) vs. a modern surface action or carrier battlegroup at war against a known threat.
It proves that a relatively old weapon can be fired and impact before anything can be done. There just hasn't yet been any conflict that has involved massed anti-ship missiles like Iran claims they wish to do, and it would be idiotic to think that the USN is invincible. Cruise missiles do tend to have a large political impact regardless of how much physical damage they actually do.
This wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ship_missile) highlights one of the main weaknesses of ship defense systems.
As effective as these naval air defense systems are, they only retain their effectiveness as long as they still have ammunition. Although expensive, anti-ship missiles still remain extremely cost-effective even when launched in their most dangerous threat modality - namely, in massive quantities intended to saturate and overwhelm their targets' defenses. Given that the cost of a single Nimitz-class supercarrier, not to mention its crewmen, pilots, and aircraft on board, is far in excess of even one thousand of the most modern anti-ship missiles available, a quantity that, if they could be launched en masse at one target, would surely devastate even the most well-defended aircraft carrier that any seafaring power could conceivably deploy.
Suppressing launch sites is certainly an option, but if your enemy is planning on massed missile fire, you have a lot of launch sites to suppress - a task made even more difficult by the missile's supposed ease of launch.
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I'd imagine they'd rain TLAMs all over Iran's launch sites before the USN decided to force the strait.
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Here you go. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-N-22) Granted, this is wikipedia, it has been known to be inaccurate from time to time.
I checked that page. (Hence my comment about the P-80 article being a red link; I'm inclined to believe Iran has them and not the Moskit, but as I said, they're lower-performance.)
Suppressing launch sites is certainly an option, but if your enemy is planning on massed missile fire, you have a lot of launch sites to suppress - a task made even more difficult by the missile's supposed ease of launch.
Again, it's not enough to merely have the missiles and be able to launch them; they have a fairly short range. (The Styx is 80km and the Moskit 100; I can't off the top of my head recall the range of the P-80.) This limits the areas they can be realistically launched from, as does their behavior; they are not designed to deal with hilly or mountainous terrain, they are designed to follow the relatively flat surface of the ocean. They also require external targeting data to be launched at ships assuming the ships are kind enough to come inside their effective range.
I'm not going to assume the USN is invincible; I am however going to assume that their Gulf One demonstrated capability to jam communications links, pinpoint transmitters, and destroy radar and communications sites, is intact. Without that targeting data to tell the missiles where to go, they are useless, and denying it is well within the realm of possibility. The ability to attack communications links similarly will affect any attempt at a coordinated mass launch.
Iraq, too, had many of these weapons and made the same threat about anyone operating in the Upper Gulf. In the event, they launched two of them in the entire war.
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nobody is immune to the propaganda spewed out by their country's ruling class. therefore i take everything every politician or every reporter says with a grain of salt. monsters rule your world. are you too scared to understand?
disarmament is completely impossible PERIOD. that cat's out of the bag. even if we could magically gather up every warhead on the planet and toss them into the sun, there is nothing to stop the creation of more. that knowledge exists, and cannot be wiped from existence.
this was a bad idea. :warp:
i have to agree here. we need nuclear technology for power generation. that usually comes with the means to make weapons. there is a lot of ranting and raving about non-proliferation friendly reactors, but im not buying it. the fact is bombs are easier to make than power reactors. thats why we invented it first (and also war). after all every time we embrace some kinda godlike power source someone is going to have a bright idea to make a weapon out of it, rather than use it for the good of everyone.
actually id go in the complete opposite direction and make nuclear weapons open source hardware so that everyone can build one. the designs for which would be completely free to download and anyone with a few centrifuges in their basement could build one. no one would be able to move a military muscle without provoking someone into nuking something. im convinced nuclear weapons prevented ww3, as opposed to starting it. these days its all these little mini wars, and i think we would have less of those if everybody had a nuclear deterrent.
i once designed a test to see if humans really deserved to exist. the test involved giving every person in the world a nuclear warhead. if a week passed without the earth's surface (in part or in full) being reduced to a smoldering ruin, then humans deserve to live. i realized it would be completely impossible for humanity to pass this test at the current time. therefore humans should be nuked.
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...
(http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/24008776.jpg)
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the fact is bombs are easier to make than power reactors. thats why we invented it first (and also war).
Um...the reactor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile_1) kind of came first. Granted, that first reactor didn't directly produce power, but it could have easily if you threw a water loop into it. Making the bomb took juuuust a bit more effort. :p
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the fact is bombs are easier to make than power reactors. thats why we invented it first (and also war).
Um...the reactor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile_1) kind of came first. Granted, that first reactor didn't directly produce power, but it could have easily if you threw a water loop into it. Making the bomb took juuuust a bit more effort. :p
SHHH, you'll shatter his dreams with talk like that.
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the fact is bombs are easier to make than power reactors. thats why we invented it first (and also war).
Um...the reactor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile_1) kind of came first. Granted, that first reactor didn't directly produce power, but it could have easily if you threw a water loop into it. Making the bomb took juuuust a bit more effort. :p
Eh, no, nuke is right. Power reactors are enormously complex. Not necessarily the nuclear principle (though it IS more complex than a bomb), but all the mechanical systems you need to control and produce power from a reactor is frankly mind-boggling. And no, the Chicago Pile could not have produced electricity. I've never heard actual numbers, but it was EXTREMELY low power. Just enough to go critical, and that's it. I'd hazard a guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 watts. Certainly it was on that order of magnitude. I'd love to see a steam cycle draw power out of that.
Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are very simple. At least the first ones were. Nowadays there's a lot of precision engineering and calculations that go into making them more efficient and destructive, but to get a nuke, all you do is smash two bits of fuel together into a prompt critical mass, or compress one bit of a different fuel to the same end. The hard part of making a bomb is getting the fuel and enriching it to weapons grade.
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i said power reactors to differentiate from research reactors. to be fair i should have looked that up to make sure my understanding of history was accurate.
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You are right that the first actual electricity-generating nuclear reactor, EBR-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBR-1), came several years after the Manhattan Project, and that modern reactors are very complex designs; I spoke incorrectly about that timing. I guess what I was going for is that the basic principle of generating energy (albeit unusable energy at first) from nuclear materials is fairly simple, while the technical expertise required to refine the material to weapons-grade is substantially more complex. Even in terms of bomb design, a "gun-style" fission weapon like Little Boy is much simpler than the implosion-type weapons used in the Trinity and Fat Man shots, and modern thermonuclear weapons are definitely another step or two up the scale.
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No. I said the USA has an interest in regulating oil prices and getting hold of oil reserves in the middle east. And since by your definition when we started this discussion, it's justifiable for a nation acting solely on their own interests to commit otherwise objectionable acts, because there's no such thing as a valid moral frame, then the conclusion is both logical and obvious.
You're conflating two separate points. The first bit of my first reply to you was pointing out that, entirely setting aside morality, the United States' actions against Iran's nuclear program were rational, which does not always equate to moral. It was from the following paragraph on that I constructed a moral justification for US intervention in Iran's nuclear program.
Good. And yet still you fail to refute my original statement about the United States wanting the oil in the Iraq-Iran border, which is one of the things you were citing as an illegitimate goal on Iran's part.
Now this is disrespectful and distasteful.
I show the same respect that I am shown. You assumed that I was ignorant of the history of the region and blathered on, based on that assumption. Quoting the rest would have served only to make a long post longer.
You don't. The fact I'm here, spending my time having this discussion with you in what is to me a foreign language (maintaining a discussion in the language you have the least domain of is REALLY hard), in a forum with a considerably large US membership that would potentially turn against me, taking the time to cite sources you can read, all that instead of just disregarding you (which would be way easier), is in itself a way of showing you respect. I actually CARE about what you think enough to be doing this, because I have the feeling you're an intelligent one. Yes, I felt offended when you condescendingly disregarded my words, so I overreacted a bit in my last post. But still, apart from my own interest in understanding you (which is already quite a compliment if you think about it), the fact I'm actively trying to persuade you is, in itself, respect at its finest.
"You assumed that I was ignorant of the history of the region and blathered on, based on that assumption."
Wrong again. I didn't said you're ignorant of the history of the region or that you were swallowing everything the CNN or any other media said. Maybe you hear the CNN, Fox News and Bloomberg News expecting them to be a reliable source of information. As far as I care, they're not, but that's not your fault. But maybe you don't even LIKE said media and maybe you're even vocally very critical about them, but yet you live in a society whose public opinion is shaped by that media, and as such that's bound to make an influence in you anyway.
Just to be clear, I'm in no way immune to the same problem. The media I choose to consume, as well as the views and tendencies in my society, end up shaping my opinion on things one way or the other. Which, while I'm at it, is one of the factors contributing to the cultural differences I mentioned earlier, which make it immoral to apply to other nations what WE, in OUR cultural context, believe is a better standard.
So what am I asking from you? Stay critical. Try to question your belief that the US intervention in Iran will collaterally result in a better situation by means of stopping Iran from developing in the way they have chosen, which you believe may possibly be dangerous and detrimental. Challenge your beliefs about what YOU consider is a better situation. Even if you end up arriving to the same conclusion again, it would have been worth the effort both to you and me.
However, I DID said imposing your standards on others IS an ignorant act, because it is my personal belief that anyone who truly and wholeheartedly understands the plights and hardships others have to endure to be left alone will think at least twice before engaging on such an act.
Again, sabotaging nuclear enrichment facilities is not the same as a whole-hog invasion, and you are being incredibly dishonest to try to turn my advocacy of one into advocacy of both.
You fail to realize I'm not trying to convert your advocacy of one into an advocacy of both. You have already stated that in your opinion, they're different things. What I'm trying to do is to convince you that you're wrong in this and that they ARE, indeed, different flavours of one and the same problem. That the problem is not a mathematical calculus about whether things might be better or not if the USA intervenes on a situation that might or might not happen, but that the problem instead is that that kind of logic is in itself not only unfair but also totally false and shortsighted, since it will only lead to greater problems down the road.
My whole argument is that THEY should decide their standards, not us. THEY. I will NOT indulge in the arrogance and ignorance of telling them what their standards should be.
Then articulate what Middle Eastern standards are, under which the region is better off with a nuclear Iran. If you fail to do that, then your advocacy of nonintervention with respect to Iran's nuclear weapons program is as wrong-headed and arrogant as you say my advocacy of intervention is, because you're saying that because US intervention harmed your region of the world, then it harms all regions of the world.
I'm giving up with you on this. I've already stated that my reasoning is NOT about whether Middle Eastern standards are good or bad from our perspective, but about whether it is moral for us to judge their standards and (even worse) to act on said judgement. The fact that you CONTINUE to ask me to do what I've already told you would be immoral and erroneous in my view EVEN AFTER I gave you the reasons why I think that would be so, indicates to me that you are both unable to refute the argument and unwilling to evaluate the validity of yours. I've done as much as I can here.
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2011/gov2011-65.pdf
Good. I'll read it as soon as I get a chance to.
Further, don't bash me for citing CNN/the evil Western media (which I haven't done, though apparently another strawman you've constructed has)
As I've already told you above in this post, it's not about you citing the CNN and other Western media (which, yes, you haven't done), but about you living in a society whose opinion is shaped by that media, which ultimately influences yours whether you realize it or not.
when the only citations you bring to the table are Wikipedia articles, which are collectively written by laypersons from the Western world.
First, that is dishonest. You can't realistically expect me to translate for you all the Spanish-written and Spanish-speaking sources I would like to cite so that you can understand them. You would (rightly) complain if I were to cite them without providing a translation, since you can't understand them and so I would be the one being dishonest by purposefully forcing you into a discussion where you would run with a clear disadvantage. So the only compromise I can find is to Google and cite sources in your language, which already means a lot of extra effort, so that by putting myself in a lesser disadvantage I can avoid putting you in a greater one, and by doing so keep the playing field a bit more leveled. If you prefer it, I will gladly cite sources in Spanish the next time.
Second, it is my belief that Wikipedia is far more trustable as a source of information than many others, precisely by virtue of it being written by a collective of persons with different opinions under a framework of strict guidelines. It is my belief that this way of processing information leads to better results, with more accurate information, and a better approximation to neutrality by reducing the influence from a particular individual or organization's agenda. This, I believe, is way safer than trusting a single "reputable" source of information, whether state-run or private-run, that will carefully select the information they choose to divulge and will manipulate the way they do it according to their own views and interests. This WILL inevitably happen, either on purpose or not. That is the reason why I believe real neutrality is impossible from anyone (yes, including me).
Note that I've repeated many times that this is a personal belief. This is a political stance about neutrality and trustability of information, and I'm totally aware other people will have their own views on this (like, for example, believing free competition from information sources will tend to favor the more neutral and accurate, or that neutrality and accuracy are impossible to reach and so you shouldn't even bother trying and instead just expect everyone to state clearly what interests they represent). So as I said, this is a political stance, and the reason why I cite Wikipedia so many times. I don't expect you to share my stance, but I do expect you to respect it.
I'm still waiting to hear your opinion about the US boycotting a diplomatic and political agreement between the legitimate government of Iran and Argentina's CNEA that would have provided a solution to this whole problem two decades ago, and about the fact that said boycotting could be indirectly responsible for the death of 83 innocent civilians and the injuring of more than 300. You can't blame the guys for being irrational if you don't leave them alone when they're being rational.
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Before I dig into the argument proper, again, I want to address two items:
First, that is dishonest. You can't realistically expect me to translate for you all the Spanish-written and Spanish-speaking sources I would like to cite so that you can understand them. You would (rightly) complain...
No, I wouldn't. First, I'd check to see if the website you cite offers its own English translation of the article, and if it doesn't, Chrome has this nifty feature that will offer to translate a webpage, if it detects that the page's text is in a language other than the browser's default. Does Chrome offer the best translation in the world? ****, no. It does have a good track record for rendering readable pages, though, and you'd have a hard time making a case for a web browser spinning a political agenda into the translation of the article.
What you've done throughout this thread, though, is say that your sources are more reliable/accurate than mine, refused to post links to the sources you claim to have, using Wikipedia as a substitute, and now blamed me for that refusal to provide your principle sources. Thanks.
Now, since it seems you're going to insist on repeatedly bring up a point of distraction, I'll address this:
I'm still waiting to hear your opinion about the US boycotting a diplomatic and political agreement between the legitimate government of Iran and Argentina's CNEA that would have provided a solution to this whole problem two decades ago...
According to the IAEA report that I linked to earlier, Iran was actively working on its nuclear weapon program at the time this deal was on the table. That makes some hesitance on the part of the United States more than a little understandable. That also makes it dubious to say that this situation would have been prevented by the United States and Argentina jointly providing nuclear material to Iran.
Finally, on this point, I'll leave you with this article from the Asia Times: Argentina's Iranian Nuke Connection (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HK15Ak03.html). It appears that in 2006, the links between Iran and the AMIA bombing fell to pieces, rendering moot the United States' involvement or lackthereof in a joint agreement with Argentina to provide nuclear fuel to Iran, as the article summarizes in its final paragraphs:
The new evidence on nuclear-technology relations between Iran and Argentina is a serious blow to the credibility of the central assertion in the indictment that Rafsanjani and other former Iranian officials decided at a meeting on August 14, 1993, to plan the bombing of AMIA. That assertion was based entirely on the testimony of Iranian defector Abdolghassem Mesbahi, who was evidently unaware of the continued uranium exports and continuing negotiations revealed in the prosecutors' report.
Mesbahi's credibility on Iran's alleged role in the bombings was also damaged by his spectacular allegation that Menem had received a US$10 million payoff from Iran to divert the investigation away from Iranian involvement - an allegation the defector later withdrew.
To square these diplomatic revelations with the charges against Iran, the prosecutors quote what they call a "hypothesis" advanced by SIDE that Iran uses "violence" to induce "victim countries" to agree to "negotiations convenient to Iran's interests". But they offer no further evidence to support that theory.
The investigation of the 1994 bombing by the Argentine judiciary, which has no political independence from the executive branch, has had little credibility with the public, because of a bribe by the lead judge to a key witness and a pattern of deceptive accounts based on false testimony.
Now, to the meat of the argument, how to best address Iran's nuclear ambitions of today:
I'm giving up with you on this. I've already stated that my reasoning is NOT about whether Middle Eastern standards are good or bad from our perspective, but about whether it is moral for us to judge their standards and (even worse) to act on said judgement.
And I'm not passing judgement on the standards of those living in the Middle East. I'm asking you how their standards differ from Western standards and how those differences result in a Middle East that will be in a morally-preferable state with a nuclear Iran. If you refuse to define a morally preferable state, then you are building an argument without a foundation, and if you continue to refuse to articulate the differences between Western and Middle Eastern standards of living vary, then this is a lousy attack on the moral justification that I bodged together.
And yet still you fail to refute my original statement about the United States wanting the oil in the Iraq-Iran border, which is one of the things you were citing as an illegitimate goal on Iran's part.
Any oil that the United States receives from Iraq comes through commercial contracts with the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Are those contracts all squeeky-clean? Certainly not. I make no denial that Western oil companies and governments exploited the chaos and power-vaccuum brought about by the US invasion of Iraq to negotiate unfair deals. I was a vocal opponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, because it was being pushed by actors with clearly nefarious intent and rationalized through arguments that flew in the face of foreign policy precedent and any available evidence. The current fact of the matter is this, though: There is a new, sovereign government in Iraq, and it is through agreements with this government that the United States receives oil from Iraq.
Any oil that Iran wants to drill from Iraqi oil fields will either require Iraq to voluntarily cede territory to Iran (which I would offer no objection to them doing, if that's what the Iraqi people really wanted to do) or Iran to violate Iraqi borders. I haven't heard anything about Iraq's government or citizens clammoring to give away oil fields along the Iran-Iraq border, so yes, I do feel it would take an illegitimate action on the part of Iran to seize Iraqi oil fields.
There's no way to take back a war that's already been fought, but there is a way to reduce the liklihood of further wars being fought in the region. Part of that is taking steps necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
You fail to realize I'm not trying to convert your advocacy of one into an advocacy of both. You have already stated that in your opinion, they're different things. What I'm trying to do is to convince you that you're wrong in this and that they ARE, indeed, different flavours of one and the same problem.
Yes, you see all United States intervention outside of its own borders as a great, big problem that can only be solved by the United States politically and militarily bottling itself up within its own borders, never to step foot outside again, except at the behest of international organizations. I have rejected that position and supported my rejection of that position, in the case of intervention against Iran's nuclear program, with rational, legal, and moral arguments, only one of which you've even attempted to refute.
And what's your refutation been? Once you cut out all of the undefined premises, strawmen, and non-sequiturs, you're left with, "US intervention is always bad because US intervention is always bad." Here! We can break it down:
- Cultural differences in most cases make neutral intervention impossible, which is a requirement for the intervention to be fair.
- Past history of abuses and misunderstandings make most interventions a further offense.
- Intervention, if it were to be allowed, would have to be performed by someone with a history that is not thoroughly polluted with acts that favoured said party's interest over the interests of the intervened parties.
- And last but not least, interventions that occurred in the past have led to this situation.
You cite cultural differences that indicate that the people of the Middle East might prefer a nuclear Iran, and then fail to define those cultural differences. You then, thrice, broadly cite most/all past international intervention by the United States as if it actually makes any kind of difference in how to deal with the current situation. It doesn't. There may well be a lot of blood on the hands of the past leaders and people of the United States for enacting policy in the Middle East that has led to the region's current state of affairs. I am not now, nor have I been, in this thread, defending the past actions of the United States. I have grievances with past instances of US intervention in the Middle East that are very similar to your own.
When deciding whether or not to take further action in the region, though, you have to consider the probable outcomes of both inaction and the various actions available to be taken. On one end of the spectrum, there is war to bring about regime-change in Iran, which would generate casualties, as well as political and logistical problems multiple times worse than the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. On the other end of the spectrum, there is absolute nonintervention, wherein Iran is free to develop a nuclear stockpile and then use the threat of those nuclear weapons to wage war wherever they'd like in the region, which would generate casualties, as well as political and logistical problems multiple times worse than the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Now, maybe this is my CNN-fueled Western ignorance showing through, but it's my understanding that not too many people genuinely want to die in a war. I will grant, there are people on the extreme fringes of Middle Eastern society who would prefer to die in an act of Jihad, versus going peacefully at the end of a long life, but I think that on the whole, people in the West and the Middle East prefer not dying in war over dying in war. Put another way, being alive is a higher standard of living than being dead in both Western and Middle Eastern culture. Therefore, by the moral argument I presented much earlier in this thread, acting to prevent or reduce the liklihood of a war is morally preferable to any action or inaction that will imminently or inevitably lead to war.
This is why the United States' current campaign of sabotage against Iran's nuclear facilities is preferable. Leaving few, if any injured or dead, it is in absolutely no way equitable to a full-scale invasion of Iran. Claiming otherwise is a naked attempt to create a false dichotomy between nonintervention and any intervention, when the real dichotomy, in this situation, because of the likely outcomes, is more accurately portrayed as an unchecked intervention aligned with total nonintervention against measured intervention. Both of the former lead to wars that can be prevented by the latter.
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No. I said the USA has an interest in regulating oil prices and getting hold of oil reserves in the middle east. And since by your definition when we started this discussion, it's justifiable for a nation acting solely on their own interests to commit otherwise objectionable acts, because there's no such thing as a valid moral frame, then the conclusion is both logical and obvious.
You're conflating two separate points. The first bit of my first reply to you was pointing out that, entirely setting aside morality, the United States' actions against Iran's nuclear program were rational, which does not always equate to moral. It was from the following paragraph on that I constructed a moral justification for US intervention in Iran's nuclear program.
Good. And yet still you fail to refute my original statement about the United States wanting the oil in the Iraq-Iran border, which is one of the things you were citing as an illegitimate goal on Iran's part.
Someone tell me where this conspiracy-theorist bull**** comes from one day, because I'd like to beat the original author with a stick.
The US gets it's oil from three primary sources, now and planned for the future: (1) Saudi Arabia, (2) Canada, and (3) Central/South America, with Venezuela being the primary source there.
Saudi Arabia has the largest conventional oil reserves on the planet. Yes, even now with all the extraction that has occurred already. Canada has the second-largest conventional oil reserves on the plant, and the largest non-conventional sources currently known (though exploration in the continental US is giving hints that US non-conventional sources may actually exceed Canada's). And Venezuela has a lot of conventional reserves too. For the audience member who can't use Google Earth, Canada and Venezuela are a hell of a lot closer and friendlier to the United States than the Iranians are, way over in the Middle East.
The recent discoveries of non-conventional crude and LNG-possible reserves and the technological advances which have made them possible have put any thought of strain on American strategic oil reserves out of the heads of pretty much anyone paying attention. The only interest the US has in Iran's oil is who they're selling it to - namely their chief economic competitor and eventual military rival, China.
The next person around here that says the US is involved in any Middle Eastern country (other than Saudia Arabia) because they want their oil needs to be slapped.
EDIT: And I'm not an American "turning against you," I'm a Canadian who's tired of hearing the same bull**** about the Americans and oil. THEY BUY IT FROM US, FOR CHEAP!
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The idea any oil is coming from Iraq to the US unless it's being transshipped elsewhere is pretty funny in itself; Iraq is still selling to Europe as it did before it was invaded.
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The idea any oil is coming from Iraq to the US unless it's being transshipped elsewhere is pretty funny in itself; Iraq is still selling to Europe as it did before it was invaded.
Maybe those evil and dastardly colonial ruffians want to gain control over the oil we're buying, so that they can cripple our economy by cutting us off from it!
VENDETTA!
Someone find my mindworms, they've got a job to do.
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Well, if ever el_magnifico is starving, I won't give him a cookie. He'd hate someone from the US intervening, even if its for a "good" reason. Shouldn't give food to anyone, or offer relief to disaster victims or anything, no sir...
Anyway, I think this is hilarious. I can just imagine how freaked the tech on the night shift must have been. :lol:
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to be fair its not like we go in and steal the oil, we actually have to pay for it.
frankly we should have nuclear reactors in our cars by now.
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to be fair its not like we go in and steal the oil
Well you kinda did in Iraq. :p
IIRC, a hell of a lot of oil was sold with very little oversight about where the money would eventually end up.
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id hope to think the money ends up in the iraqi economy. even if it goes through a few corrupt individuals in the process.
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The next person around here that says the US is involved in any Middle Eastern country (other than Saudia Arabia) because they want their oil needs to be slapped.
And what is about the oil wells in Somalia and the gas-pipeline through Kosovo ? ;)
Cynics joked between 1990 - 1992 that the Somalians and Bosnians are desperately drilling for oil to get the USA to help them.
Then in 1999 the NATO started the Kosovo War some of the Anti War Protesters claim that the reason for the war is that the Europeans wants to build a Pipeline other the Balkan.
Neither the fact that no oil is produced in Somalia nor the fact that the pipeline was never build would ever change the believe that it's always the oil...
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Little-known fact: The American Revolution was fought because the colonists got sick of sending their crude oil back to Britain. ;)
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It all makes sense now!
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Conversation Reboot as story develops further. Iran has had enough mocking and is quitting the internet. :lol:
http://gizmodo.com/5932276/iran-is-quitting-the-internet-because-its-afraid-of-america
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Iran has been working on their 'intranet' for some time now. The fact that they actually have it up and running now does NOT bode well for civil rights in the region. The Iranian government no doubt included a kill switch for their own custom, private intranet.
But this move won't make them immune to cyberattacks - it just means that organizations like the CIA will actually have to use field agents if they wish to deliver another virus.
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Something about the headline "Iran Quits the Internet" makes me giggle.
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But this move won't make them immune to cyberattacks - it just means that organizations like the CIA will actually have to use field agents if they wish to deliver another virus.
Based on what we know, they already were doing that, so...
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What are they gonna do, physically sever all data lines at their borders?
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What are they gonna do, physically sever all data lines at their borders?
Seems legit.
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Or they could just block it at the outer nodes.