Don’t be silly, our constant drone attacks are public knowledge. And claiming that the Pakistiani people aren’t angry about it is basically the same as claiming they aren’t human; of course they are angry. Who wouldn’t be?
You largely answer your own question; they have nukes. And the Pakistani government sucks up to the US more than Iran does, which is the rest of the reason. America hates Iran mainly because they’ve never rolled over and submitted like we wanted, and even overthrew our Shah-puppet.
The collapse of a government isn’t the same as the collapse of a nation. Destroying Iran economically will do the latter, not the former; you don’t get democracy from a mob of starving, desperate people.
And them becoming a democracy would just invite further hostility from us when they failed to turn themselves into an extension of the US. America has never been pro-democracy except in its rhetoric. America has always wanted puppet dictatorships, not democracies.
Check out comment sections in Pakistan dailies. There are many in favour of the drone strikes.
But the crux of the issue is that the anger is not based on facts. The drone strikes have legitimacy - the Pakistani government approves of them and enables them to be carried out although it denounces them in public. The collateral damage if the military were to try and do it for themselves would be higher by far than that caused by the drone strikes.
The anger is manufactured because the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment have used Islamic militants for almost as long as Pakistan has existed and it still believes in good and bad terrorists. Those it can use against Afghanistan and India are good, and those that fight it are bad. It has little to do with the actions of the US, apart from the fact that allying with the US created the ‘bad’ militants for them in the first place. And that was my point - if you think anger against the US in Pakistan has much of anything to do with US actions, you’re mistaken.
And check out the news reports of massive protests against them.
It’s called “sucking up to America”. That isn’t legitimacy, that’s being bullied.
No, the anger is perfectly predictable because foreigners bombing people tends to make people angry.
That’s just standard right wing rhetoric. It’s pretending that non-Americans aren’t human enough to care if you kill their friends and relatives. It’s the same kind of reasoning that led us to invade Iraq under the assumption they’d love us despite having bombed Iraq into rubble.
If some other country did this to America, Americans would go berserk. But they seem totally incapable of admitting that other people would feel the same.
17 vs 44 isnt quite that tiny, no. Check out some of the other cites from The Economist article from places closer to where the drone strikes actually occur.
Heh. You’d be surprised at how little it takes to organise a ‘massive protest’ in these parts of the world.
I’m not even American. My reading of the evidence is that the actual people in areas close to where the drone strikes happen are more likely to support the drone strikes. I’m just telling you from a somewhat neutral standpoint (I’m Indian. I’m glad that Pakistan is hopefully and at long last learning that terrorism is not a good tool to use, but I have no dog in how the Americans are viewed. I couldn’t care less.) that Pakistani anger isn’t really based on American actions. It’s just convenient politics.
That’s a false equivalence. If Pakistan dealt with the Islamic fundamentalists that use its territory to launch attacks in other countries, there would be no need for anyone else to step in. Instead, if you’re feeling charitable it is either incapable, or as almost everybody believes, it actively abets them. See the BBC documentary called Secret Pakistan if you don’t believe me or American sources. There’re plenty of others too. If the US were doing something of the sort, I’d be perfectly happy to call it that way.
You can’t have it both ways. If massive protests can be faked, so can polls.
Being Indian is hardly neutral given the longstanding hostility between Pakistan and India. And they certainly aren’t learning that terrorism is bad; the drone strikes are terrorism. They are simply expensive and high tech terrorism, instead of poor people’s terrorism; they just aren’t called that, in a classic example of “terrorist is what the big army calls the little army”.
As if that would stop us any more than it stopped us from attacking Iraq. Drone strikes are about “looking tough”, not about actually accomplishing anything.
I’m not saying the protests are being faked - I’m saying the emotions that lead to them are being whipped up by political interests.
And I freely admit I cannot easily claim neutrality in the case of Pakistan, but I do on the issue of how and why the US is viewed the way it is in Pakistan. It doesn’t matter to me one whit if the US actually is conducting evil acts that make it deserve every bit of condemnation the righteous can dredge up.
As for Pakistan learning terrorism is bad, what makes you think I’m referring to the drone strikes doing the teaching? The extremists they have supported for decades have finally decided to bite the hand that fed them. The terrorism that Pakistan itself has been facing from the Taliban has at least brought a competing narrative - that using Islamic fundamentalism and jihadis may not be a great idea - into their public sphere where earlier there was none.
I believe it was Charles the emperor of Spain who said “Fracis [King of France] and I want the same thing; we both want Milan.” It was understood that it was a power struggle and there was no need to justify it morally.
What makes America a dangerous menace today is the belief of the American people who believe they are on the side of good while the others are on the side of evil and that this gives America a right to rule the world. It is no different from the belief of Muslim fundamentalists who believe they are on the side of good and their enemies are evil. They are just two sides of the same coin.
I never cease to be amazed by the capacity of humans to rationalize and justify anything and everything our side does and to condemn and fail to understand anything and everything the other side do.
In the last 150 years America has not ceased in their attacks on nations which had done nothing to provoke or deserve it except be weak and have resources America wanted. Iran, having oil, has suffered several attacks from the west. First invaded by the British. Then their regime overthrown by the CIA and the Sha puppet installed. Then, when the Iranians overthrew the Sha, America waged a war against them using Iraq as a proxy. That war caused Iran untold misery and death.
Iran has never been the agressor in all these things, it has always been the victim trying to defend itself. And yet Americans say Iran are the bad guys? Really? What world do we live in when just defending yourself from American aggression makes you the bad guy?
Americans manage to discount all facts and justify America’s aggression because someone said “death to America”. Really.
Iran need and deserve to have nuclear weapons because it is the only way they can be safe from America. And I expect they will get them and have them and then America will quiet down and stop messing with them.
Iran has never come to attack us in the west, we have gone to attack them in their homes and they are defending themselves.
Enough is enough. Let them live. Guarantee their safety and security and they will be friends. We are the ones making enemies, not them.
The difference between Pakistan and Iran is that in Pakistan the government likes us (well, tolerates us as long as we pay them off) and the people hate us, whereas in Iran, the government hates us (or pretends to) and the people like us. Let’s not forget that it was the Pakistani government that created the Taliban in Afghanistan, and we know where that lead.
Pakistan is largely Suni, so that’s not much of a shock.
:rolleyes: I guess that explains why the US has dropped nuclear bombs on every country we don’t like, specifically targeting civilians in the process. Please produce a cite that Americans think we should “rule the world”.
Note that, for the topic under discussion, most Americans want to pursue a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. If Iran does get nuclear weapons, it’s not just the US that will looking at a possible military solution, all of NATO will be on board, and last I checked, Spain was a member of NATO.
So All those countries which have been attacked by America, including Iran, should be grateful America has only used conventional weapons and not nuclear weapons. They are so ingrateful! Gotcha. And rolleyes right back at you.
How about 150 years of recent history where America has not ceased invading and attacking other countries? How about thousands of threads like this one where Americans support attacks on Iraq, Iran or any other country which crosses the USA?
How many times has Iran attacked us (western countries) in the last 150 years? Zero. How many times have we attacked them? Pretty much non stop. And they are the bad guys? It takes a really distorted point of view.
Well, if you’re going to compare the US to Islamist terrorists, I suppose they should be grateful. Look, I am not going to defend the myriad terrible things the US has done over the years by interfering in other countries, but if you see no difference between al Qaeda and the US, then I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.
“How about NO, Scott.” I guess you don’t have a cite, then. And where the hell are you getting the “150 years” from? I can see that you’re now just spouting any negative thing you can think of, whether factual or not. We’ve attacked Iran “nonstop”? Nonstop?
How many times has Iran attacked the US? Well, a certain attack on the embassy and kidnapping of the Americans there constitutes an attack on the US.
At any rate, if you want to start a thread that “The US is teh EV1L!!!”, go ahead. Otherwise, it’s a hijack of this thread.
I am not saying Mace is a neocon. You are wrong. Mace makes a neocon argument on Iran and Mace is denying that the argument is not a neocon argument.
I believe it is detrimental to diplomatic efforts to declare that Iran is only throwing the West a bone in negotiations. That is a neocon ploy to ridicule and disrupt the West’s attempts at gaining a diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue with regard to Iran.
Sure, Iranian financed and training terrorists bombed the US Embassy and the Marine Barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing nearly 400 people, most of whom were associated with a UN peacekeeping mission. Plus, Hezbollah has conducted numerous attacks in the West, including attacking embassies in London and Argentina, hijacking planes, and god knows what else. But the Iranian terrorists were surely just defending themselves, and they really just want to be friends.
You have written in agreement with the neocon argument that Iran is throwing the West a bone in these negotiation just like Assad did in Syria. You are ridiculing the West for negotiating when you wrote that.
That helps the neocon cause.
If you didn’t mean it when you wrote it why not just say so and explain it?
So in a thread about sanctions on Iran any post questioning whether we have any moral right to use measures of force to make Iran comply with our wishes is a hijack?
So this thread is only about all the perceived bad things Iran may have done to deserve our displeasure? Like being in bed with Al Qaeda? Like Saddam before them?
No, it’s not, and I’m not ridiculing the West’s diplomatic efforts. You need to stop seeing everything that you disagree with as some neocon plot. Besides, neocons are sooooo last decade!
Nice try. It’s a hijack to turn this into a debate about whether the US is the most evilest country that to exist, everrrrrr!!
The US is not alone in this negotiation with Iran, nor is the US the most hawkish. The sanctions are international in nature, and have nothing to do with what the US may or may not have done 150 years ago.
However, if you don’t think it’s a hijack and would like to continue that discussion here, we can invite a mod into this thread and ask him or her to decide that point. Should we do that?
You’re aware that Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and thereby legally and voluntarily surrendered any pursuit of nuclear weapons?
You known damn well that if the United States were undertaking some actions that were inconsistent with – though perhaps not a black-and-white violation – a major international treaty, you’d be hopping up and down, screaming about US imperialism and how America is so duplicitous that you can’t trust the nation’s treaty commitments.
But when it’s a non-Western country in that position, you basically argue that the evil West forced them to do it and everyone should be more understanding about the whole matter. I am usually dismissive of the right-wing talking canard about “the blame America first crowd,” but your posts in this thread confirm that Rush Limbaugh and other knuckleheads like him aren’t always exaggerating.
In exchange for the assurance that they would not be attacked.
America has reneged on its international committments whenever it has suited them. Often.
And I hop whenever I feel like hopping without need for America’s permission.
No, I am dismissing the American propaganda which blames its victims to justify its crimes. The fact is that in the history of USA-Iran relations the USA is the guilty party and yet American propaganda make them out to be the villains. It is all made up shit just like it was when America attacked Iraq or many other countries it has attacked without any other reason than “we want to steal their shit”. Years later historians recognize the truth but by then it is too late as the deed has been done. America has a long history of spoiling for fights and this is just one more case.