They’re actually very nice and polite in person, and quite the lovely hosts.
See here and here for some of my muted personal impressions
as a serial visitor to funny farms myself, I did not mean to cast opprobrium on our zealous brothers, merely to comment on the “separate reality” bit.
I left at about 8pm. As the night wore on, there was more music and fewer speakers, And more and more of the speeches were in Farsi, and thus, almost entirely indecipherable to your humble narrator.
you left too early. They generally don’t break out the hash until 1 am or so…(at least that’s how it was in afghanistan.)
Reading through the thread, I don’t see what the debate is. It’s actually changed my mind.
The US is so evil and heavy-handed that we can’t trust anything Wahington does. So any opinion or stance from America is moot. It’s pointless to entertain any objections or concerns about Iran enriching uranium, even if they all but state on record it will be used for weapons.
And because America thinks Tehran will ultimately use the technology to make the long-sought nuclear weapons, the rest of the world should shut up and accept it will happen. If America is against it, that means it’s right.
All you other countries that think it’s not such a good idea to let the mullahs have unsupervised play time with their toys, you can relax. America doesn’t think it’s a good idea, so there must be nothing to worry about.
America, in it’s never-ending quest to control the world, has long stated it’s opposition to Iran’s regime. That should prove Iran is benign.
It’s obvious that anything America condemns is a warm fuzzy waiting for all other countries to cuddle with. We’re wrong. We always are. I accept that.
Allow full and unfettered nuclear technology in Iran to proceed. Who are we to say it’s wrong? I’m sure they want to use it only for electricity.
After all, the Iranian regime has long proven they are more concerned with the betterment of mankind and peace around the world.
I’m willing to forget about Bam where the Iranian government turned down US aid money to help the people dying after the earthquake. Sometimes it’s better to let people die than save your own people. That earns respect, in my book.
Given that, I just wonder how Israelites feel about a nuclear Iran. Maybe that’s the point, though. Take some heat off the US and let the Jews be killed again. According to at least 3 Dopers in this thread, that seems to be best.
Of course, at the time the US was posturing support of MEK, it was because they were fighting the USSR. Enemy of my enemy and all that good stuff.
Our few shrill voices in this thread that can’t differentiate what was happening then is typical of a lot (though not all) of the America Bad[sup]TM[/sup] crap we see today. No sense of history, no understanding of world politics, and no understanding that world politics take longer to fully take effect than a PlayStation game.
The US never supported MEK in any way for any sort of religious stance. It was never shown to be that in the '80’s. The mujahadeen were fighting the Soviets from taking over. Whatever you want to say about the war in either theater today, it’s nothing close to what the USSR was trying to do. Ask someone in the former republics.
Had MEK declared they were fighting for an Islamic state and wanted to set up base for killing any infidels, the truce between Moscow and Washington would have been been made years before than it was.
Long before asking anyone to tear down a wall.
Shit. I was talking about the mujahadeen in Afghanistan during the 1980’s. Not the group nor the organization linked.
I wouldn’t want to qualify the link as anything other than a biased source. But I doubt alaric cares about credibility. America bad!!!111!1one!
Well Duffer, ya sure convinced me. Let’s not take any chances, let’s go in right now and kill every last stinkin’ one of 'em, just in case. Let’s keep fighting Israel’s battles for them too, even the ones that haven’t started yet.
alaric cares about credibility
certainly not my credibility with the likes of you.
Well, if Americans would stop raping, torturing, invading, kidnapping, and in general terrorizing the world, perhaps America wouldn’t qualify as “bad”. Until then, it is.
We don’t do those things. The government said so :rolleyes:
If this dispute continues unabated, we can expect gas topping three dollars a gallon as a short-term consequence.
The real flash point, in my opinion, would be an Iranian move to close the Straits of Hormuz, which they threatened today. I spent six years in the Navy, a large part of that time parked on a carrier in the North Arabian Sea. The reason that a carrier has been there every day for the past 25 years or so is to keep the straits open. If the Iranians move to close it, bullets and missiles will fly if they don’t back off.
At that point, gas goes up to five dollars a gallon.
as I understand the topography, a simple “accidental” scuttling of an apprpriately sized vessel will do the job, leaving ambiguous the underlying motivation thus obviating bullets etc. as a remedy.
You’re right. If only America would go away we could have world peace.
Wait. What’s that you say? There has been war and conflict for thousands of years? But America was only formed a few hundred years ago.
Obviously everything we’ve learned of wars prior to 1642 is bullshit. America wasn’t around then to start them, so they didn’t exist. We all know, thanks to the brilliant and reasoned posts from Der Trihs that any and all confilct in the world today is caused by evil America.
And the troubles in the Middle East? All our fault. We were the ones that tried to colonize the area, we were the ones that drew borders, we were the ones that allowed the issue of an Israeli state to be needed. Europe had nothing to do with it.
We were also the ones that forced the issue of all the former SSR states to be formed. We were right there forcing our will on all those countries after WWII. We were actively helping Moscow try to annex by force the Afghans.
Wait, what do you mean we were trying to help the Afghans resist the Communists? What do you mean we should have foreseen the fundamentalism we see today? What do you mean we should have seen the trouble in supporting the Shah?
At the time, it seemed a pretty good deal considering the blatant takeover Moscow was trying to push. Granted, in hindsight, the crystal ball was cracked. But at the time? It was the best choice in a bucketful of shitty options.
But history doesn’t matter here. America is bad. At least for the short-sighted. A century ago it was a safe bet that America could avoid negative consequences by staying out of any conflict in foreign lands. Maybe we should go back to those glory days.
Unless a government attacks us on our soil, we should sit by and watch it happen. Makes sense to me.
duffer, I was talking about what is happening right now. All your speechmaking about what happened a hundred or fifty or twenty years ago is irrelevant.
That, or attacks our people/property; otherwise, it’s not self defense. Attacking a country that is not a threat is the act of a barbarian, which is no doubt why Americans are so fond of it.
My apologies. I didn’t realize history was a moot point. We must live in the now.
Your first and third sentences in your first paragraph are basically true.
The rest of what I have quoted is blatant revisionism on multiple levels.
The group that became the Taliban (for example) openly declared their intention to impose Islamism on any territory they reclaimed, yet the Reagan administration deliberatrely favored them over other mujadaheen groups on the grounds that they were better organized and we did not care about their theocratic urges.
The MEK has long been considered a terrorist organization (and was the only truly terrorist group that the State Department identified as being in Iraq leading up to the Iraq invasion). Of course, the moment we got into Iraq the OSP and other political agencies established inside the DoD and Intelligence agencies immediately tried to get them taken off the terrorist list simply because their terrorism was directed toward Iran even though we pretended that we were making war on terrorism.
I agree that there is some knee-jerk America-bashing in this thread, but it is not legitimately refuted by simply pretending that some of our bad ideas have not come home to roost and that other of our bad ideas are being propagated by an adminstration with tunnel vision and no sense of history.
The Arabic take on this matter:
http://www.amin.org/eng/uncat/2006/mar/mar5-0.html
Please comment.
So, I think here is some truth(s), but which ones?
Anyhow, I think this is how many people in ME sees it.
And there is certainly some ‘How to hurt USA’ in the text.
My own beliefs are that China & Russia will play with Iran, just so that the US “Number One Hegemony” will decrease.
It cost them nothing to do so and as Putin has promised, to sell Iran weapons.
Does “Oil for weapons” sound familiar?
Bin Ladin to Bush:"Say ‘Petroeuro’ George. No, that was a car. … 'U-Row’http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=295939