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.
