I’m not terribly interested in much of anything that goes on in the ME - other than wishing that the US had less to do with any/all of them. The news reports I glanced at said “regime change” and discussed plans (apparently quashed by the US?) to assassinate Khameni (sp?).
That’s all I intended to convey. Assume what you wish.
I don’t see any need to build a nation in Iran. Instead, I perceive benefits to be derived from cooperating with the nation that exists. Nothing we’ve ever really tried on an ongoing basis.
Neither North Korea nor Israel has nuclear weapons.
North Korea has nuclear bombs, but they have no means to deliver them. Their missiles are unreliable and small, and their bombs are unreliable and large. A bomb without a means to deliver it isn’t a weapon.
Israel has, for decades, played coy about whether they have nukes or not. That makes all the sense in the world for a nation that doesn’t actually have nukes, and no sense at all for a nation that does. Most of the benefit from having nukes comes from everyone else knowing that you have nukes, and therefore, if you have nukes, you make sure that everyone knows for sure, by openly conducting a very public test. Meanwhile, if you don’t have nukes, you can get at least some of the benefits by making people think you might have them, so you play the do-they-or-don’t-they game.
On a different note, why does everyone always treat nation-building or regime change like some sort of dirty word? Near as I can tell, the Marshall Plan was a resounding success. Expensive, maybe, but even so, it’s paid off. But everyone always says things like “Well of COURSE we shouldn’t be involved in nation-building; that would be heinous”.
I mean, yeah, this administration would screw it up horribly, but I mean in general.
Yes, this is another reason why North Korea’s detterance comes entirely from its proximity to and relationship with China, not from its nuclear program.
IMHO it’s because with a couple of notable exceptions, those being the Marshall Plan that you mentioned as well as the efforts of Douglas MacArthur in Japan (and at least getting South Korea started down the path, although the final result of course wasn’t directly due to MacArthur), we haven’t done it the right way. MacArthur went in with the best intentions of the nation of Japan as his goal, and later tried to get South Korea started down that path. Even a sane, competent POTUS like Truman didn’t tolerate that.
In other words. MacArthur took a “Japan first” approach, which is why he succeeded. Efforts by someone like Bush Jr. were destined to fail because he didn’t go in with the proper mindset of “Afghanistan first” or “Iraq first” the way that MacArthur did in Japan. And of course there’s no way that Trump would send some general to Iran with instructions to “rebuild Iran your way, with Iranian interests first. American interests second, and Israeli interests not and all”, which is what an effort like that would take.
In this view, what is the reason for, e.g., Jordanian cooperation against Iran? Is that because the Americans also want to hurt Jordan by proxy, or because Jordan has been bought off, or because Amman is secretly in league with Tel Aviv, or..? Did Iran also get in Bahrain’s face, and that’s why Bahrain has provoked (?) Iran into its new revanchist attitude towards them? When Iran ended joint sovereignty over Abu Musa in 1994 and began militarizing the island, was this “successfully defying the US” and, if so, was the UAE complicit or also a victim of the American desire for conquest?
The first country to launch an attack on Iranian soil in the 21st century wasn’t Israel, it was Pakistan. It seems to me like the simplest explanation for Iran’s fraught relationship with Jordan, Pakistan, the EU, the United States, Ukraine, and the entirety of the GCC except Qatar is because Iran appears to desire to become a regional hegemon, manifesting in a willingness to foster Shia sectarianism (Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, but see also i.e. Nigeria and Egypt) and actively destabilize any potential rivals in the name of a substantially incoherent “resistance” to the US and Israel that nonetheless sees it occasionally more than willing to join them under the table.
And it seems to me that the simplest explanation is that Iran’s opportunistic and fickle posture towards the allies it does have—Iran helped to overthrow the Taliban in 2001, for example, then supported the postwar insurgency and hosted Taliban leaders; Libya was with Syria one of two countries to support Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, which Iran repaid by immediately throwing Qadhafi under the bus when the uprising started; having lost perhaps its closest African ally, Sudan, Iran has begun supplying both sides of the Sudanese Civil War—comes from Tehran’s own ideological extremism and unreliability making them a pariah state entirely of their own design.
But is the assumption here that, if Iran acquired nuclear weapons and therefore was no longer threatened by American aggression, it would simply wind down its entanglements and stop trying to overthrow every government that it perceives as insufficiently committed?
The second point is pretty important here – and applies to both Israel and the US. Incompetent and malevolent leadership aren’t going to successfully thread the needle in an extremely difficult task.
But more than that – when was the last time nation building, or regime changed, worked? When has it ever worked without a massive coalition of allies working together?
The only times we ever really succeeded at “Nation building” was in Germany and Japan after WWII. I was talking about this in the pub last night.
There were reasons those succeeded. In Germany, by the end of the war, even most of the German citizens were ready to be rid of Hitler and the Nazis, and so they decided to work with the occupation forces to rebuild Germany.
In Japan, we had the Emperor deciding to surrender, and he told the Japanese people, “Enough is enough, we’re ending this war and working with the victors to rebuild Japan”, and he had enough moral authority to convince most of the population to agree.
Will we have that in Iran? We never did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yugoslavia, et cetera. How well did those go?
Israel has (or at least implies they have) nukes, and still gets attacked regularly. The threat of them didn’t prevent October 7th, and isn’t stopping Iran shooting missiles at them right now. Iran having nukes wouldn’t stop America promoting regime change there, either.
Nuclear weapons aren’t a good protection from all, maybe even from most threats.
the only achievable (maybe) goal is to slow down Iran’s building of nukes by a decade or two, instead of the mere months which we are facing now..
Everything else that happens will not be due to achieving a goal–it will be just the unintended consequences which nobody has consciously defined as a goal.
yes, this is a good description of the attitudes in the US. And that’s why I predict that America will not get involved in this war, in any way.. (hey, folks–check back here in a week or so, and tell me if I’m a genius or a fool )
Trump’s declarations (such as :Unconditional Surrender") are meaningless, he just impulsively repeats whatever words somebody told him a half hour earlier, Though I did like one thing he said yesterday, which make a good motto for Trump’s entire life::
“nobody knows what I’m going to do” .
“Nobody” includes himself, I assume.
After World War II. Which, so far as I can tell, was also the last time it was attempted.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US position was “We’re going to tear out the old regime, and then do nothing at all to build a new one, because OF COURSE we wouldn’t do something that horrible!”. Which was the worst of both worlds.
It’s been “mere months” for years. Decades. I wonder why you’re so eager to believe such a proven liar as Netanyahu (and his disgusting allies in charge of the government).
The real expense of the Marshall Plan was the “regime removal” step prior to the plan.
And that’s the source of the disapproval. It’s debatable whether war can be justified according to certain specific causes, but “forced regime change” is beyond the line for many observers.
The only reason I can think of to have opposed such action is the thought that it might not work. But the operation so far has gone resoundingly well, so my doubts and skepticism have been silenced in light of new evidence.
If you’d asked me two weeks ago, I couldn’t have imagined a war with Iran starting off like this.
There is only one purpose for which Iran wants its “peaceful” nuclear facilities.
They are working steadily and surely to achieve that purpose, getting closer and closer to their final goal..
Lets make an analogy:
Suppose a registered sex offender moves in next door to you, convicted for having a computer full of child porn, which he claimed was for his own “peaceful” use. The court (i.e the UN is this analogy) sends a parole officer to inspect your neighbor’s home computer. The inspector tells you that your neighbor has no porn right now, so you have nothing to worry about.
So the inspector tells you that you must let your neighbor babysit for your little child.
You have nothing to fear…the inspector told you so !
A few years ago, Israeli intelligence famously stole an entire warehouse full of top-secret documents archiving Iran’s nuke program. That’s a whole lot of verified facts, not lies.
I assume that the only lies are what Iran shows the UN inspectors. After all, they don’t have to show the UN anything, they don’t have to negotiate the JPOC treaty, etc…they could have just unlocked that warehouse and let the world read all about their peaceful intentions. It would prove how honest and peaceful Iran truly is.
Except nobody seems to show any reluctance for that step. We removed Saddam from Iraq, and we removed the Taliban from Afghanistan, and then nobody was sure what to do next.
Sure, according to propaganda. Iran is the devil, of course, and would happily risk its own obliteration for a chance at killing Jews.
In reality, I’m not so sure. After all, the JCPOA was verifiably working for 3 years before Trump tore it up (with Netanyahu’s blessing). You continually have ignored this fact (why?). Is the possibility that Iran was willing to abide by that agreement so terrifying to your world view? I think the Iranian government is evil (as are the Israeli and US governments at the moment, for that matter), but evil governments are a dime a dozen. Suicidally fanatical governments are a lot more rare, except in fiction and propaganda.
The administrations in charge at the time didn’t have any reluctance, but there were plenty of cautionary voices. Who turned out to be right, as you point out. The price of forced regime change can only be ethically justified if the aggressor can win the peace as well as the war, which happened in the 1940s but still hasn’t happened in the 21st Century’s iterations.
So maybe Israel doesn’t want to bite off that particular unswallowable apple, given the lessons of recent history.
By what criteria are you assessing that it “has gone resoundingly well”? Sure, they’ve blown up a lot of shit and killed some people, but do you know that that was sufficient to derail their entire nuclear program? We know for sure that they haven’t scratched the big underground bunkers, and we’ve apparently lost track of where they’re keeping their stockpiles of already enriched uranium.
The idea that Israel is going to invade and occupy Iran is delusional.
If Israel hitting Iran’s nuclear sites, military bases, and government institutions rocks the regime so much that it collapses, that’s a nice benefit, but it’s not the primary goal.
And if the regime does collapse, regardless of what comes next, it won’t be as bad as a very well armed government that’s dedicated to Israel’s destruction, which has a network of terrorist proxies across the region, and which is building nuclear weapons.
)