BTW, Ryan, since you feel so strongly about all of this, when are you going to join the British Army so you can march off and do something about it in person? 
My impression is that Khomeni doesn’t really have a cult of personality in the same way as the Kim’s, Hitler or Stalin have/had. Power was way to centralized in his hands, and he was a de-facto dictator in most of the ways that count, but he isn’t the focus of the state like in Korea.
I’d say this is one of the very few good things that can be said about Islamic states, they’re not really conducive to cults of personality, as Allah is supposed to be top dog and unlike other religions (Catholicism springs to mind), Islam isn’t really set up to allow for a human supreme authority on the will of God.
And N. Korea aside, Ryan, your explanation of how economic isolation led to the fall of the Soviet Union needs, at the least, some serious fleshing out. Russia and its allies were not the technological backwater, they had nukes, a space program, all that jazz. And they had at least as much of the world population under their control as did NATO and friends, so it’s as correct to say we were isolated from them as they were from us. Why didn’t the West go down in flames?
If you were to say that communism is not as conducive to technological advancement and integration as capitalism and that this caused the fall of the Soviet states, I’d probably agree with you. But again, that’s an internal problem with the Russian economy, not something caused by external economic isolation.
My family has served in Northern Ireland, the Sudan, world war two etc, but I can’t join because I have as bad Asthma. So I contribute anyway I can
Me too. I can’t even serve as a JAG – I checked. Oh, well.
Well, don’t forget, they used to have something called a Caliph or “Commander of the Faithful,” who at some periods was effectively king and pope in one. But nobody has claimed the title since the Ottoman Sultanate was abolished, and I doubt anyone ever will again.
You told me you had no military connections in the family. Need a link to the recent pit thread, where you stated this?
Apparently, people pay attention to you RL
It’s interesting that a couple of years ago during the run-up to the Iraq war, one of the litanies from the anti-war crowd was, “Why Iraq? Iran and North Korea are much more dangerous! Why aren’t we attacking them?”
At the time, I accused the anti-war types of bait-and-switch, and said that if Iran had been the one in the sights, you guys would be yelling, “Why not Iraq first?”
It would seem I was right, judging by the speed at which you guys have jumped on to the “Iran isn’t so bad” bandwagon.
In the meantime, here’s an example of life in in Iran: Iranian Blogger’s Story of Arrest
My heart goes out to him, Sam. And I mean that in all honesty. I truly wish to see Iran emerge from its revolution as a indigenous model of democracy for the Middle East, and with that gain all the human rights that Persians themselves first enshrined into law (universal declaration of human rights).
But other than the emotional appeal, what was your point with that link? That Iran does bad things to its people? So what?
I would agree that North Korea was a more dangerous issue than Iraq. (I still think that starting a shooting war with them would be counterproductive and I recall very few people who advocated actually starting a war in Korea.)
I call bullshit on any clamoring to go after Iran at that time. You might be able to find an occasional poster who thought that we should “do something” about Iran, but the majority of the opponents of the Iraq invasion were divided between those of us who felt that Bush was an idiot to abandon Afghanistan to start an expensive and counterproductive war in Iraq, and those who felt the U.S. had no business invading either country.
There was a lot of criticism of even artificially creating an “axis of evil” that included Iran. (Especially since the “axis” included two long-standing enemies.) The primary claim was that having identified this imaginary “axis,” and then threatening a shooting war with Iraq, we were stretching our forces too thin in case Korea (or, much more remotely) Iran initiated a fight.
A possibility that you may not have considered is that the mention of Iran in that context was to demonstrate that the ostensible reasons for the invasion of Iraq were less than airtight rather than a call to invade Iran. I know that’s what I was getting at when I brought up Pakistan, The World’s Greatest Proliferator of Illicict Nuclear Technology and The Country Most Closely Linked to Al Qaeda.
I can’t really speak for anyone else though. Perhaps they were clamoring that we should go ahead and invade these other countries too.
I was not. I was merely pointing out how the line of reasoning presented in Team Bush’s sales pitch didn’t stand-up to scrutiny. YMMV.
Just a thought.
oops sorry, I meant immediate family.
Who has said that Iran isn’t so bad?? I can find one sentence (by Nuerotik) that says Iran isn’t a threat to the United States. A very small bandwagon, really more of a private coach. And I’m sure Nuerotik agrees Iran is bad, just that it isn’t a threat.
Everyone has a right to an opinion on anything and everything. That’s quite different to it being their business. It’s quite clear that many in the Middle East have political opinions about how Western countries are run. Does that make it their business that demands action?
It’s scary just what a mindset is evident about western style democracy. You may think it’s the best thing for everyone. I might think it’s the best. But it remains an opinion, only one way of running things, and certainly has its own drawbacks. It is not the US’s job to be World Western-Democracy Cop, so anyone imagining that this the prime mover in US (and UK) foreign policy is deluded.
Cite? Sounds like an opinion to me. Opinions can be wrong, especially in the long term. That’s why we used to only go to war when countries actually stepped out of line, not when some thought they might sometime in the long term future.
Absolutely, Iran is bad. I’d never want to live in that country ever (unless maybe my only other alternative was Saudi Arabia…). It is, without a doubt, an oppressive theocracy and a regime repugnant to anyone who values democracy and freedom.
It is not, however, any real threat to the United States or to our democracy and freedom.