A couple of nights ago I watched Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” show on CNN about his visit to Iran.
The people there were incredibly friendly and hospitable. Don’t confuse the average Iranian citizen with their government. The same can be said for a lot of countries, but especially those with less than democratic leaderships.
The young people in Iran (and there are lots of them) are very westernized. Women are treated as equals and they all want the same things the rest of us want.
I think a lot of us have a distorted view of the people of Iran due to what gets reported in the media, and I’m pretty sure they have a distorted view of the US for the same reasons.
Oh of course. How could we have missed that. :rolleyes:
All it would have cost us is Turkey going down the drain as a NATO ally, their likely movement from secular to Islamic and their intervention in the cesspit that Syria and Iraq have become.
And the Turks, if they ever put their minds to it, probably have the economy and the know-how to develop a nuke as fast, if not faster than Iran. So let’s go ahead and give the Kurds (who have been terrorizing…or freedom fighting in Turkey for decades) the means to be a major pain in the Turks behind.
There is a bit more to this world, adaher, that just the narrowest of focus.
And BTW, on the Golda Meir quote above; Iranians are Persians, not Arabs; a fact that may not be important to you but most assuredly is over there.
Never implied that they were Arabs. Just refuting this idea that all families love their children and don’t want them to be cannon fodder. A lot of Israelis have paid with their lives because those kinds of parents exist.
OKay, so we’ll sell out the Kurds and the Saudis, but the Turks are too important? You know what doesn’t make sense about that? the Kurds and Saudis are fighting for us. The Turks aren’t.
Wow, being a friend of the US is not a good thing in that part of the world, is it?
They are fighting who we want fought. The Iranians are fighting who we want fought, and who we don’t want fought. Much more of a mixed bag. Our two actual most important allies in the region are not too happy.
I see where the President is trying to go with this, but much like GWB and Iraq, this is a role of the dice. And just because he isn’t committing 150,000 troops that doesn’t mean it’s any less of a consequential risk. A lot more consequential, actually. If he’s wrong, this one ends with a general Mideast war.
Actually, it does mean it’s less of a “consequential risk”. It means we’re not risking 150,000 troops. Even if he’s wrong, it doesn’t mean we have to go to war. And I’m much more worried about us going to war than several poor countries who pose nothing close to an existential risk to us going tow ar.
Perhaps you could flesh out some of the details for those of us who do not have your remarkable gifts and penetrating insight. First off, precisely how would that affect Iran’s capacity for nuclear arms development? With all due awe…
A reasonable point could be made, though, that should the “worst case” scenario come to pass - that is, a general 30-Years-War, Islamic-style, between Sunnis and Shi’ites - the West would get sucked in anyway.
The West may, from a realist perspective, care nothing for the lives of folks in the ME, but they surely still care about the impact of a general ME sectarian war on the world’s supply of oil.
To be clear, that’s just the worst case. The best case is that the Shi’ite militias, together with non-radical Sunnis of various stripes, crush ISIS like mad dogs and then work out some sort of compromise among themselves.
His nephew, Nechervan Barzani - Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraqi Kurdistan - has done the same thing.
The Turks are mostly thrilled - “great news for the Turkish economy,” tweeted its economy minister, Mehmet Simsek. Trade between the two countries is expected to double in the next two years.
To my knowledge, all of NATO is positive to the deal.
The Kurds definitely hope the deal will cause Iran to look more kindly on them, both inside and outside of Iran. The Iraqi Kurds would dearly love to see Iran lined up solidly with them against ISIS.
If you look around that Kurdish website, you will see that hasn’t always been the case up until now.
By that logic, no deal would ever be sufficient because they could always be moving forward their weapons program serruptitiously (in some huge underground secret military complex I assume), so we might as well just bomb them now.
This happened to me once but with urinals at an airport. The bathroom was empty and the guy chose the urinal right next to me. Its not like I had the urinal closest to the door, I was about 4 or 5 urinals in and the guy took the one right next to me, he had to walk by 3 other urinals to get to the one next to me (and he could have gone down a few more urinals because there were probably a dozen or more urinals along the wall. I thought it might have been a cultural thing I was unaware of .
