[NGTM-1R]

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.

[Alex Heartnet]

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.

[BlueFlames]

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.

[FireSpawn]

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?

[Legate Damar]

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.

[NGTM-1R]

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.

[jr2]

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.

[el_magnifico]

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. 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.

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

"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.

[Scotty]

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.

[Alex Heartnet]

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 reveals dozens upon dozens of articles that mostly back up my claims.

[NGTM-1R]

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).

[BlueFlames]

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.

[Alex Heartnet]

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.

[NGTM-1R]

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.

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.

[Alex Heartnet]

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.  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 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.

[StarSlayer]

I'd imagine they'd rain TLAMs all over Iran's launch sites before the USN decided to force the strait.

[NGTM-1R]

Here you go.  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.

[Nuke]

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. 

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.

[Sushi]

...

[Mongoose]

the fact is bombs are easier to make than power reactors. thats why we invented it first (and also war).

Um...the reactor 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.