Ok, I guess that it is my turn to ask for clarification then. Specifically concerning with what you disagree? You disagree that American foreign policy is helping to radicalize Islam? You disagree, and think that I really am blaming America? Not quite clear and, as you pointed out earlier, not trying to pick a fight just asking for clarity.
I don’t think that America has anything to do with Iran executing children or any responsibility for it. There may be many, many thing that I agree America has some responsibility for, but this isn’t one of them. I think we agree on this.
I understand (or I think I do) that you were not saying that America has any responsibility for these acts specifically but rather for the recent move to radical Islam. I disagree with that assessment due to the reading I have done (which is admittedly limited and almost 100% on the web), but I do not claim to be a fountain of knowledge on this matter.
So when the Great Satan labels a barbaric & evil regime accordingly, that helps reinforce the evil? I think you’re giving the ‘Boy King’ too much credit. He called a spade a spade and instead of asking where are all the grassroots reformers from within Iran are, you take the easy way out and place some of the blame on American foreign policy.
Tomndebb, I’d like to know if some of your sentiments concerning Iran’s nuclear reactor capabilities have at all changed after reading (once again) how brutal these Mullahs can be.
Your concerns about the Iranian economy are heart warming. I say to hell with their evil policies and their cost-benefit ratios. If there’s such a shortage of rials over there, why not suggest the stop funding Hezbollah?
As was said upthread by someone else, it’s entirely possible to put the blame squarely on the Mullahs while recognizing, at the same time, that the words and actions of the single world superpower influence other nations strongly.
The mullahs and ayatollahs have been on the far side of good sense and many have been on the far side of goodness ever since 1979 (and before, but without the power).
Their brutality has been known since 1979.
However, unlike Kim Jong-Il and his father, nothing about the leaders of Iran indicates that they would be willing to bring total ruin down on their own heads just to make a point. Using a nuclear weapon would bring their entire world to a complete halt in a rain of fiery death and glassy sand. If they get the bomb (and I am willing that we use any diplomatic means to prevent that) they will use it as a defensive deterrent, just as every other nation has done, following August 10, 1945.
Executing children is a matter of degree. They are farther off the charts than we are. We are farther off the charts than most of the rest of the world. A willingness to set a too young age (or to ignore mental impairments) to hold a person responsible for their crimes does not equate to a desire to unleash WW III.
Are you willing to set the same sanctions on our great trading partner, China, as you wish to impose on Iran? The argument regarding China, (but never, curiously, Cuba) is that we will overwhelm their intransigence with the wonders of free market economy which implies a free exchange of ideas. I see no reason to behave differently toward Iran than we do toward China. If anything, the Iranian people have enough education and contact with the West that if the power of the mullahs slips, their tendencies as a people will be to form closer associations with the West. I see no similar trends in China.
Regarding my first post in this thread, it was intended only as a factual description of how and why the perception of the “moderating” Iran had changed in regards to the last elections. The moderating notions of the Iranian middle class have not had the power to prevent atrocities such as the murder of children by the state for many years and I do not think that Mr. Bush’s rhetoric changed that in any way.
Colour me surprised, a gum rant about muslims.
I suspect the Mullahs would have done this sooner or later anyway. And it is not as if the Parliment had any power in fact. Actually, this might cause further discontent more quickly, as the young have no outlet.
But seriously, Bush said what was the truth in his eyes. The fact that evil men did evil things because they can’t face that truth says something about them, not him. It can be argued equally fiercely and truthfully that D-day contributed to Germany speeding up the use of Death Camps as well.
Huh? If the Axis of Evil included all the countries that are at least as evil as Iran, there’d be scores of countries on our short list for invasion. And Bush clearly helped in my mind to reverse their liberalization. But they are still nowhere near a clear third “worst” power in the world.
Mullah: "Evil? How dare he call us evil! We’ll show that bastard what evil really is! Bwahahahaaa! <chops head off random citizen of Iran> That’ll teach him to call us evil. :rolleyes:
It doesn’t seem to me that the Mullahs needed any encouragement from anybody in the creation of evil. They always did fine on their own:
“Prime Victims”
http://www.iran-e-azad.org/english/book_on_women/chapter2.html
There are two separate ideas in this thread that some posters are needlessly conflating.
The Ayatollah Khomeini lived out the wet dream of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Donald Wildmon, securing his own private theocracy where he could impose his odd version of “God’s” law on whomever he wished. His successors have continued on, indulging in the suppression of liberties and engaging in “legal” punishments that would make even an extreme stereotyped Texan blink.
This has led to the execution of children even younger than those the U.S. is willing to execute.
Subsequent to the Khomeini takeover, the people of the country (familiar with many Western modes of life and thought) began asserting their desire to moderate or mitigate the theocratic state. Over the course of nearly twenty years, they used the ballot to take control of more and more of the Parliament. The Parliament was still subordinate to the Theocrats, but on many day-to-day issues (and on some growing number of policies), the moderates of the Parliament were able to edge the country closer to the priciples of democracy–a very slow process given the oversight of the theocrats.
During this time, the theocrats continued to punish people for “religious” crimes, including persons whom we would never punish due to their age.
In the last two years, concurrent with the administration of the U.S. government invading the countries to the East and West of Iran and declaring Iran part of an “evil” consortium (with two countries with which Iran did not associate–one of which was an enemy), the theocrats decided to re-assert their power and decertified most of the moderate political parties, disenfranchising those people in Iran who had struggled to move the government–however incrementally–toward a democratic and more free society.
Nothing Prsident Bush has said or done has had any effect on the legal murders in which the theocrats engage. On the other hand, his statements do appear to have made it much more difficult for anti-theocrats in Iran to have any say in the government.
18? Because if you have a cite for ANY municipality in the US actually executing a minor, I’d like to see it. If you don’t (and you don’t), then you’re just hyperbolizing out of your asshole.
You know what I say? I say “Fuck Yea”. I think that in the big picture of things, this is a good, wonderful, fantastic, spectacular turn of events. As the aging cadre of Mullahs tries to clamp down on the hard won freedoms of the moderate majority in Iran, all they are doing is ensuring their downfall. The backlash against them, when it comes, will be enormous, especially since they have abandoned the modest concession that they made towards reasonable behavior. People don’t give up freedoms won easily, not for religious or any other reasons. You want to blame the US for all of this? Go ahead, but to my mind, if it was US foreign policy in Iraq that directly caused this, it’s a good thing, not a bad thing. 5-10 years from now when the people of Iran look right next door and see how people are treated in a democratic society, the pressure against the totalitarian regime in Iran from their own people will mount even more, assuming that the Mullahs haven’t been tossed out by then, which I think is the more likely scenario.
You’re not going to see teenagers actually executed in the US because it takes 6-10 years after the death sentence to actually take someone to the death chamber.
That doesn’t make us better than Iran in that regard, it just makes our justice system slower and more methodical. The end result is the same, a child is sentenced to die, and is killed.
Claims that the US is somehow less barbaric than some other country are laughable. Our behavior with women and children in Iraq alone is enough to put us in league with any other theocratic fascist state.
Fuck those barbarians?
Fuck Bush, Dobson, Rove, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfield & every one of their supporters. They’re just as barbaric as any Iranian mullah.
Sadly, the point still stands that there are dozens of little tyrannies still in existence that are at least as evil as Iran. And human nature doesn’t quite work out the way the Potted Plant planned: “Let’s call Iran one of the Top Three Evil nations in the world and insinuate they are working with batshit crazy Korea and Iraq! I bet they’ll come crawling to us just begging for us to love them again!”
No, I don’t have evidence for this, but I believe the inclusion in the Axis of Evil gave incentives to certain pro-liberalization factions to lay low, allowing the clerics to re-assert their entire power. After all, as we’ve seen in America, it’s hard to approach foreign policy with reason when your country is seen as being under attack.
I can’t help but think that these liberals would also lessen, to at least the extent that the hardline clerics would, the rule of harsh sharia law. That’s why I said it was only a belief of mine, not a proven fact. Although certainly it could work the other way around, theoretically, where hardline clerics impose their will upon the whole country more effectively than a liberal faction seen as too urban and decadent by the backwater rulers, thereby allowing a slight lessening of the harsher sentences. Who knows. All I know is calling them part of the Axis of Evil was mind-boggling, stupid, and perhaps counterproductive.
Foam at the mouth much? We have carefully waited until children have reached their 18th birthday before we executed them, but there are over a dozen kids who were convicted of capital crimes and then executed after they reached “adulthood” (and we still execute those who are mentally retarded whose minds are those of children).
As to the rest of your rant: it is possible that you will be right. On the other hand, you may be encouraging the sort of violent overthrow that has led to so much suffering in so many lands, while I prefer the steady application of pressure that led to the (mostly) non-violent fall of the Iron Curtain countries. I suppose that it gives one a warm feeling to see blood running in the streets when you think that “your side” is winning, but I am not sure that the people who actually die appreciate your cheers. There is also a second aspect to this: the theocrats in Iran are not some tiny minority holding the country at bay. There is a very large minority of people who actually support them. This means that the moderates may want more time to persuade their countrymen of their positions. Putting on an outside show of force does two things: it unites all Iranians against the aggressor, even if they think their own country needs to be improved, and it provides propaganda to the supporters of the theocrats that recruits more undecided Iranians to the side of the theocrats. This, of course, could result in an eventual civil war that the theocrats could win again. I really believe that thinking things through is a better approach to international relations than mindless and fact free ranting, YMMV.
And for the record, I am aware that last March SCOTUS finally outlawed the executions of which I spoke, although the execution of the mentally incompetent has not yet been outlawed.
You dumb fuck. I color you pathologically stupid and hoplessly ignorant. Gum’s rant is about proto-humanoid scumbags who torture and murder children for being gay. Your tacit advocacy for their barbarism is beyond outrageous.
Yes Tom, it warms the cockles of my black little heart to see blood running in the gutters of Iraq and elsewhere. I’m hoping for some well publicized raping and pillaging soon, it makes my dick hard and then I masturbate furiously. If you want to make a serious argument, you might want to tone down the idiotic rhetoric. Lately you seem to be working hard to get in with the cadre of morons on these boards. You seem to be following the RTFirefly model, from reasonable poster to batshit crazy, ain’t you got fun?
As to the rest, far from being uninformed, my opinions are based upon not just what I read, but from talking to actual Iranians. I have quite a few Iranians as clients, and the subject has come up more than once. Some of them have been here since the fall of the Shah, and some emigrated more recently. They all seem to agree that the fanatics running the country are inevitably going to lose power as the younger generation in Iran moves to the fore. Will it be a bloody revolution or just a generational shift? Nobody knows, but the consensus seems to be the later. You say that they may all unite in the face of a common foe. If we were to invade Iran, you’d be right, but I think that as likely as our invading Mexico, it just ain’t gonna happen, in spite of what the hysterical shrieking lunatic left wants us to think. As Iraq stabilizes, that will put even more pressure on the old guard in Iran, hastening their inevitable downfall. The Soviet comparison is a good one, but not for the reasons you seem to think. We fought a war with Germany, occupied it, dealt with insurgents and terrorist attacks in the wake of the war, but it was the rebuilding of Western Europe and the economic prosperity that followed in it’s wake that pounded the last nails into the coffin of the Soviet hegemony. It took generations, but it happened. I see the same thing happening in the Mid East. Unfortunately, it will likely take at least one generation, and, in this country at least, generational time frames are a foreign concept to politicians who want to grab power now, making the whole mess a dandy target for political rhetoric and grandstanding.
Yes, but isn’t that like looking at just about any crime committed in the US and ascribing some blame/responsibility for it to all the Presidents that have shaped the country into one where these crimes can be commited. While it may be true in some super-macro sense, what is the point. A butterfly flaps its wings…
The fact is that those who dislike our current President are quite quick out of the holster when they see an opportunity to paint Bush or his policies in a negative light.
But who reversed yours?