When did they announce a test? There’s no reason for a nation to have nukes without making sure everyone knows it, so a nation that hasn’t done a test can be concluded to lack them.
North Korea has nuclear bombs, but they don’t have nuclear weapons. A bomb isn’t a weapon without the means to deliver it to your enemies. And North Korea also wasn’t overrun before 2006.
How many weapons did that program ever produce? Just because someone tries doesn’t mean they succeed, and a “nuclear weapons program” that has not yet produced any nukes isn’t any sort of deterrent to anyone.
He was overthrown by his own people in a civil war. There were outside forces supporting factions on both sides. “The West” hardly played a decisive role.
Here’s a paragraph from the original charter of Hamas. This is their founding document…like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. You know–Hamas, the good guys, whom all the good progressives on campus are proud to support..
Read it yourself, and decide if they respect Jews. This is their version of DEI, so don’t dare criticize it on campus, or you’ll be labelled islamophobic.
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cite: the Federation of American Scientists website
The US seriously considered bombing North Korea in 1994 to stop their nuclear program.
The US didn’t and now NK has nuclear weapons. Not only that, but North Korea is the world’s major proliferator of nuclear technology to rogue states like Iran, Libya, Syria, etc.
Today, North Korean nuclear-armed ballistic missiles could strike targets in Northeast Asia and some North Korean ICBMs may have the range necessary to reach the United States but with an uncertain degree of targe accuracy.
If Israel denies having nukes to appease the US, then they can give that up now, if they choose.
If they announced today that they had nukes, the U.S. response would come from Trump, who would say something insightful like: “Everybody knew they had nukes. Especially me, I knew before anyone else.”
The UK was the single largest recipient of Marshall Plan aid, and most of the money in the Marshall Plan was used to buy materials and goods from the US. It also gave the US considerable control in the economies of recipient countries.
Yeah, I’ve bolded the by far most important part of your post. Because we’ve been down that road many, many times. But hey, maybe these Islamicists won’t turn out to be bad for their country… or countrywomen, anyway.
Any bombing boner trump might have could be deflated by playing clips of his old nemesis saying, like, “how did that song go…bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran…”.
Aren’t there at least a couple of significant differences between pos-WWII “rebuilding” and possible current “building” in the ME?
-Germany and Japan had established industrial/consumer economies prior to WWII. As opposed to, say, Afghanistan. Or Iraq/Iran/Libya.
-After WWII, we had completely defeated and occupied Germany and Japan. Are we willing to conduct such complete military defeat and occupation of any ME country? Given their less centralized, less industrialized nature, how readily is such complete subjugation possible>
-WRT Iran, we have a history of contravening their internal politics and emplacing and supporting a horrible dictator. Once he was overthrown, we failed to make any consistent efforts to meaningfully interact with the new government. When we had a somewhat workable nuclear agreement, we unilaterally walked away. With that history, it would be difficult to obtain volitional cooperation.
And let’s not skim over the “expensive, maybe” part. Adding in the costs of participating in WWII. I see no indication that any portion of the US - public or government - is eager to accept such costs in order to “build” any ME nation.
And “regime change” is something the US has always been happy to do when it could be done inexpensively and was perceived as supporting some US interest. (My favorite is “Operation Just Cause” in Panama. I prefer the unofficial longer name, “Just Cause We Can!” ;)) Unfortunately, we don’t seem terribly interested in “changing” regimes in a direction that is more democratic. Just to install someone more favorable to US strategic/corporate interests. And, once we break things and install a puppet, we have a pretty good track record of just walking away, and tut-tutting the inevitable decay.
Iran, unlike Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya, is a country with a real history whose people feel a connection to, not just random lines drawn on a map drawn when the British were leaving. The idea of Iran is much stronger than the idea of any of those other countries. So I’d be shocked if Iran fell completely apart, like some of those other countries did.
Oh, they might lose some land - the Balochis in Pakistan have been really active lately (including with some really ugly tactics), and there are many Balochis in Iran too - and the Kurds have of course always wanted out. But “Iran” as a concept has a very long history; it has much more staying power than those other examples.
Funnily enough, the sense I’ve gotten from reading Iranian thoughts on the matter (mostly expat Iranians, but also number of Iranians who are still in Iran) is that they’re pretty insulted by the comparison.
But that’s the weird part. The expensive and difficult part is the military part, destroying the old regime. But we (by which I mean “the elected officials we elected”) were just fine with doing that in Iraq and Afghanistan: We did go in and completely militarily defeat the enemy. And then, we said that of course we weren’t going to do the rebuilding part, because that would be reprehensible.
Doesn’t Iraq have as much of a history as a nation as Iran? So far as I can tell, both go back to the dawn of history.
There is a history of human civilization in Iraq, but there is not necessarily that same history with the control of the whole modern country of Iraq as a single polity. Whereas most parts of Iran have been Iranian or Persian for a very long time.
If you pick up a map from a random year, odds are, Persia or Iran is there, in one form or another.
Iraq, on the other hand, is always inhabited, but also almost always ruled from elsewhere.
The exception is the Abbasid Caliphate, but most of the progress they made in developing Iraq’s core was undone in 1258 when the Mongols sacked Baghdad. And even there, the Caliphate was by its nature Pan Arab, not Iraqi; compare that to the empires of Persia.
Yeah - but the relatively meagre USAid was too expensive.
I am far from an expert on Iran/Persia. I don’t know how far back Babale wishes to go in terms of defining modern-day Iran, or what sort of economy/values/government he expects a “rebuilt” Iran to exhibit. I’m not sure how meaningful it is to note the lengthy history of “Persia.” Especially WRT current borders/regime/economy.
I’m pretty sure Iran’s primary exports are extractive, which I believe differs from pre-WWII Germany and Japan. Also theocracy and tribalism. Not sure how Babale’s post responds to that.
Modern day Iran is Persia; the world switched to the name “Iran” in 1939, at the request of the Shah.
Persia is an exonym, a Greek corruption of Fars, a province in Iran. At the time that the Greeks came across the Persians, they were controlled by a leader who came from that region, so they called the whole Empire that, and it stuck. Iran is the endonym for the whole shebang, hence the Shah’s request that the name be changed.
