Do you doubt that Iran was working toward building their own nukes?
Do you think that day they get them is infinitely far into the future?
Do you only care about that sort of rhetoric when it comes from Westerners, or should we look at how Iranians who are much higher ranking then Fetterman talk?
I mean its just common sense that Iran wasn’t going to give the US the same concessions as before we screwed them over.
I have no idea. If they were competent and working on nukes, according to our leaders, they should have had them months, years, decades ago. Once they actually have nukes, they lose their leverage in any negotiation that would try to prevent them from getting nukes. They had value from being nearly nuclear capable without actually having nukes.
Now, explain to me why now was the time to drop bombs (with this totally incompetent administration) and not during the first Trump administration, or the Biden administration, or after Trump is out and we have a non-useless SecDef and DNI? Why now?
Iran is not an existential threat to the US, the US is very much an existential threat to Iran.
It’s also common sense that the US won’t give Iran the same concessions (IE, Iran will not have any enrichment capacity going forward - which should have been the deal from the start.)
- “Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens.”
– Britney Spears (2003), in an interview with Tucker Carlson, about the Iraq invasion.
- I’ve posted this before (my words):
Ever hear of the Free Concert at Altamont (1969)? The organizers decided to contract security to the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club for about $500 worth of beer.
Violence was the result. Scores were injured. At least one died. Property damage was ginormous. It was a disaster.
This is an example of the wrong solution to a legitimate problem.
Trump identified a few legitimate problems in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 campaigns, but he was the absolutely wrong man, with the absolutely wrong plan, to address those problems.
Whatever the question, Trump isn’t the answer.
Whatever the problem, Trump isn’t the solution.
Even if ‘the guy is only familiar with the Iraq War,’ the parallels are inarguable and are ignored at our ultimate peril.
Iran’s a bad actor. Just like beating your kids shows a shocking lack of creativity, temperament, self-discipline, and imagination, there are/have been other ways of handling Iran.
I’ve seen this movie before. It definitely sucked.
In that case the US is too untrustworthy to negotiate with anyone on preventing nukes and we’re just going to live in a forever war over dictators understandably viewing nukes as the only way to protect their regimes.
By the way the other reason Iran would never just give into the same arms control regime as 2015 is that Trump also cut out our sanction partners who had made sacrifices in some cases (i.e. Russia) to their enemies to maintain a united front. Now Iran knows that they’re never going to face a sanctions regime like the one that existed before 2015.
Again, that’s not what breakout time means.
They put their nuclear program on pause, able to hit “resume” at any time and rapidly make a nuke.
During the time their program is paused, they can work on other things that help that goal and shorten the time for a bomb: test bomb designs in secret, without radioactive material; build bigger missiles that can carry more bombs, and stockpile more of them; enrich more and more uranium up to the limit so they have a bigger stockpile once they’re ready to cross the limit, and build more enriching capacity so they can run past the limit faster; etc.
All of this is stuff they can work on and build up in the background so that when they are finally ready, the threat they pose is larger. (As noted in another thread, they were building up their ballistic missile capacity to the point where they could have posed an existential threat to Israel with conventional weapons alone in a few years).
The time to drop the bombs was probably under Obama, instead of this disastrous deal that allowed them to continue funding their proxy network and build up their missile stockpile while inching closer to nukes and growing the amount of nuclear material they’d be able to produce when ready.
As they say, the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago; the second best time to plant a tree is right now.
The biggest critique of Netanyahu that I have at this point (on foreign policy, overall it is and will always remain the judicial reform bill) is the fact that he has clearly thought we should do this in Iran for a long time now, but he was too much of a scared little bitch to do it before October 7 forced his hand. We should have fought this war a long time ago - it could have prevented October 7.
You can play that game forever. Why now? Why not tomorrow? You can do that for lots of things. Why clean the garage today? Why not tomorrow? Rinse and repeat.
Personally, I think Iran should have been stopped from building Fordo in 2006. If their nuclear program is all peaceful then put that stuff on the surface.
If that’s the lesson dictators take from this, then 1) they’re particularly stupid and 2) we clearly need to make them into a lesson io other dictators.
The bad lesson was allowing North Korea or gain nukes because we were too scared of China. That was a bad lesson to little wannabe dictators across the world, and it was a terrible lesson to China. Letting Russia take Crimea unopposed was another disastrous lesson.
If other dictators start to get ideas about nuclear programs, we should destroy those programs, and topple those dictators if necessary. Do that three or four times, and even the dimmest of dictators should get the message: go for nukes, you die.
Nothing is worse for a dictator than being deposed or killed and the US has already done that to dictators whether or not they’re pursuing nuclear weapons. That’s a problem that can’t be solved by deposing them even harder.
Yawn. The usual “dictators only do bad things because AmeriKKKa forces them to” argument.
Cite that Iran was enriching more uranium and building more capacity to enrich uranium before Trump pulled out of the deal.
The reason why NOT now is that our government and defense is being run by incurious, ignorant, incompetent lackeys and yes-men, who lie constantly. You can’t run a successful war with this administration in charge, and you can’t trust anything they’re telling you about the conduct of the war.
On top of that, if we go on a war footing, it just gives this authoritarian regime more of an excuse to clamp down on protests, arrest people. It’s bad for the US to do this, it’s not in our interest in any way, it’s another step towards the end of our democratic experiment.
Those who advocate for the idea that we can bomb our way to peace, and the mistakes of the past were not enough bombing, should be endlessly mocked and belittled.
I couldn’t have more contempt for such fools. Such a world, Netanyahu’s world (and Hamas’s world, and Rumsfeld’s world, etc.), is a world of perpetual war and bloodshed. And in such a world, there will always be a place at the top for Netanyahu and those like him.
Imagine you are a dictator. You already don’t care how evil you are, you just want to make a rational decision to save your own skin. You’ve seen in the past that dictators were pursuing nuclear weapons and had their facilities attacked agreed to stop their programs and get inspections in exchange for other countries not continuing to attack them, only for those countries to attack and depose those dictators anyway. Why would you take threats or promises from those same countries seriously?
Right, those are precisely the people we need to communicate with, by showing them that the moment you start an illicit nuclear program, the full force of the armies of the nations supporting the global order will descend upon you and wipe that nuclear program out.
And if you don’t they could wipe out your entire regime anyway.
Aww, no! 
I feel so sowwy for the poow widdle wictatow! Poow widdle guy…