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. 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.
