Iran has negotiated like no one will ever attack it, and that was a correct assumption for decades
However, due to Iran's overly aggressive use of questionably rational proxies, Hamas has dragged it into a regional conflict where it lost most of its proxies power.
After the last war, it also is no longer a threshold state, so the only leverage they had left was ballistic missiles, which were also handled quite reasonably by Israeli air defense.
In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal that heavily restricts Iran's ability to enrich as well as ICBM, trigger with existing uranium stockpiles removed.
As Iran due to ideological reasons refused, and IMO had miscalculated this will be a win-win, as losing will quell the protests, the only thing really left is the metaphorical stick
> The point is preventing another North Korea style nuclear blackmail state
The US and Israel are currently nuclear blackmail states. The rational move for Iran to prevent itself from being bullied is to have nukes like North Korea.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US
Fair if you're the US, sure.
Neither of these states have at any point said anything on the modern era that can be implied to be a threat to nuke anybody.
Part of that is because it would be a bad strategy for them, but nonetheless "nuclear blackmail state" and "nuclear state" is not the same thing.
Especially not when they’re mass murdering protestors and funding islamic extremism left and right
What recent months show us, is that it's a rough world - there are no friends. I'm rooting for European countries to accelerate their nuclear weapons programs. In an ideal world, of course I would be against. But the world is far from ideal. The current alternative is being dictated the rules by Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. Thanks, but no.
The NPT did not exist at the time of the US developing nuclear weapons, and it explicitly allows US (and other pre-existing nuclear powers') weapons.
Israel, like India and Pakistan, simply never signed it, forgoing the international nuclear technology market as a consequence but also avoiding a treaty obligation not to develop them.
The NPT has much stricter terms for withdrawal, which in any case Iran has not followed.
(The better and much more relevant analogy would be the JCPOA. That's what happens when the US does foreign policy by "executive agreement" instead of treaty. Foreign countries should not value them more than the paper they're written on.)
Perhaps you will argue that the US or Israel or Pakistan or North Korea have conducted themselves in a way where they do not have that moral right either, but that is a different debate, and either way it is moot because they do have them.
North Korea invaded South Korea, stole a US Navy ship (the Pueblo, which they still proudly exhibit), dug large infiltration tunnels under the DMZ, kidnapped hundreds, or even thousands people from SK (and Japan, to a lesser extent), and have assassinated, or attempted to assassinate, multiple SK heads of state, and perpetrated acts of terror like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858
What did the US or SK do to them before their nuclear program that constituted "bullying?"
Iran signed Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
No. If they wanted self-defense and sovereignty they should have become stronger not weaker after the revolution.
In many ways I think it would be better than the world controlled by the US axis.
Then again, I am not from the US nor Israel nor any muslim country. I just hope the countries I care about stay out of this Iran deal.
This would allow me to quietly hope that Iran somehow wins this in the long run. I have this tendency of supporting the aggressed party in uneven conflicts.
Automatically presuming that the weak side is the morally right is such a skewed an naive world view.
However, in this case, the US-Israel axis is undoubtedly the agressor, and morally indefensible.
In the Russian invasion against Ukraine, I can hope Ukraine succeedes without ascribing morality to the Ukrainian government.
Hell, the US ambassator to Israel basically admitted to it in an recent interview with Tucker Carlson.
Also, lest we forget, the US has a huge laundry list of supporting insurgencies and actively sponsoring coups everywhere. Especially in Latin America.
To be frank, Iran sounds pretty tame in comparison. If your argument is that they are evil, I would counter they are definitely the lesser of two evils.
So.... Go Persia?
Let’s perform a thought experiment. Israel is 8 million Jews, half of the country is an unpopulated desert, our largest border is with Jordan which is barely defensible. And you think that we want to conquer Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and parts of Iraq? With what army? How can we support such a conquest? How will we defend that border? Sharing a border with Iran? How will 8 million Jews handle the 40 million Muslims that will allegedly be conquered? This makes so little sense that believing it just exposes your radical bias.
I hope you are counting the current prime minister with your fingers.
> And you think that we want to conquer Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and parts of Iraq?
I think Israel is an extremely aggressive country, yes.
> How will 8 million Jews handle the 40 million Muslims that will allegedly be conquered?
Conquered? No, the 40 million would be murdered if Israel has its way.
Speaking of numbers is very disingenuous when it an bring along the US to this fight.
I said that Israel has genocidaire ambitions towards its neighbors, I never said anything about conquest.
Population numbers would matter only if Israel had ambitions to rule over the people. When your intention is murder the numbers are only a challenge to your goal.
Desire? Absolutely. That's what they have been doing with the Palestinians after all.
As I said before, I have no dog in this race. I personally prefer the countries I care about to not get involved in this conflict, and hope the US-Israel axis lose somehow.
I stole that silly axis jargon from you. It is very fitting there now.
Do you think all people in your country should get the same rights?
And I’m not entirely sure what point are you trying to make, that terror countries like the houthis should have nuclear weapons, or that people in a country should not have equal rights.
When someone is attacking me obviously I want the bigger and stronger weapon.
> After the last war, it also is no longer a threshold state
That's also wrong. Trump claimed Iran's enrichment capabilities were totally destroyed, but they weren't.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal
America already had a good deal. Trump got rid of it.
No. There's a number of reasons for this. #1 is Israel's policy of "strategic ambiguity" and #2 is that it might be illegal to even mention it in Israel. Israel prosecuted a whistleblower nuclear scientist for leaking state secrets, for example.
> And who have they blackmailed with the nukes?
The US, for one:
"Similarly, in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, IDF was again outnumbered by the invading Arab armies. Then Israeli PM Golda Meir authorized a nuclear alert and ordered that nuclear warheads be readied for launch from missiles and aircraft. The Israeli ambassador to the US, Simcha Dinitz, met with Henry Kissinger to inform President Nixon of “Very serious conclusions” if the US did not airlift arms supplies to the IDF. Nixon complied with this demand due to the threat of the use of nuclear forces. This was the first successful use of the Samson option as a threat and tantamount to nuclear blackmail."
from: https://thesvi.org/deconstructing-israels-samson-option/
I also recommend: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/wait-why-is-israel-allow...
The Samson Option enables Israel to blackmail the entire Middle East, and do so silently. Turkey or Egypt can't afford for Hezbollah to overrun Israel, because Ankara and Cairo might get nuked, even if they had nothing to do with contributing to Israel's existential crisis. It basically forces the whole neighborhood to keep each other in check out of sheer self-preservation. Credit given where credit due, it's a smart approach on Israel's part.
Didn't we have one of those a few years ago? I wonder what happened to it /s
Seriously, though: how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
And didn't we already attack them to stop them from getting nuclear capabilities?
- Military - their regional proxies destroyed, missile and drone stocks low, provably weak air defences.
- Economically - the currency is worthless, extreme inflation for seven years and hyper inflation for a few months, the economy is currently producing nothing due to unrest, they have a massive water shortage of their own making. They have no goods worth exporting. Their oil is sanctioned, meaning only China will buy from them and at a steep discount. And oil is extremely cheap at this minute.
- Politically - they have no friends willing to bail them out. Russia has no money to spare. China doesn’t care about anyone outside of China. North Korea is even poorer. All sections within Iranian society detest the mullahs running the government. They’re hanging on by killing tens of thousands of protestors.
Trump bets that Iran’s leaders are at their weakest since their war with Saddam ended in 1988. Meaning now is the best time to negotiate a deal where they hand over their fissile material and uranium enrichment equipment. In return they could get a heavy water reactor(s) that produces energy but no fissile material.
If he lets this opportunity slip Iran could fix all of their many problems in a year or three. Manufacture more missiles and drones. Build up their proxies once more. Maybe the price of oil recovers. Russia’s war ends and they aid Iran best they can. The economy recovers and the Iranian people stop trying to overthrow the government. Maybe a conflict starts elsewhere that draws America’s full attention.
Will Trump get that deal? Probably not. That fissile material is the only leverage the mullahs have. If they give it up they’ll be toppled like the other dictators who gave up their weapons programs - Gaddafi and Saddam.
But if you don’t ask you don’t get, right?
It was one of the primary triggers for the protests. People are very upset about the economy and willing to protest and die for it.
Yes, although it had merit it was far worse than what can be signed now, especially the sunset clause was problematic
> Seriously, though: how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
that's the nature of nuclear weapons, your conventional force can be abysmal (pretty much NK situation vs US) and yet you can create epic destruction
> And didn't we already attack them to stop them from getting nuclear capabilities?
Yes, the thing here is the long term goal of signing a deal, whose main goal is removing the existing highly enriched uranium from Iran and restricting their ability to redevelop nuclear capabilities. Essentially this is the part where "Diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means" (to highly paraphrase), because the alternative to a deal is maintenance attacks such as these every two years
> how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
baby and a granade. You want to keep granade out of the hands of the baby.
Acquire weapon = acquire power;
Keep it without weapon = keep it weak(er).
Iran is a bad guy state ... but the "fair" atgunent hwre dont apply.
Iran had a signed agreement, trump cancelled it. Israel literally killed Irans negotiators just a few months ago. What is this nuclear level ignorance.
North Korea aspires be to be a Israel-style nuclear blackmail state.
You can bomb the leadership all day long.
Without boots on the ground the regime will probably continue.
I don't see how this stops Iran from building nukes. Sure they may have a temporary set back.
But do you think this will change their minds?
Can they even negotiate a resolution with the US. Given that the current administration won't honor its own agreements.
Did Trump issue an ultimatum here? And demand something?
Possibly wishful thinking, but that’s the only way I can make it make sense in my head.
I can't make up a story that will be good for iranian people in the end. Is there even an example in last 100 years that started out like this thing is starting out and ended well for the people?
What hasn’t come up enough in this thread is the currency crisis that triggered the protests. The economy is in shambles and they’re still simmering anger about the Mahsa Amini killing.
There Iranian people are tired of being under the thumb of the mullahs. They don’t want to live under an Islamic theocracy.
Millions of Iranians all over the world and inside Iran are cheering us on. They’re done. Yes, they’re scared and they don’t know what will come next, but they know what they have now is intolerable.
it’s possible this could all go badly, but what the Iranian people have now is worse. We have to try. Every Iranian person I’ve met is hopeful something better will come.
What happened afterwards in reality was 20+ years of escalating corruption and sale and systemic destruction of any valuable assets - culminating in the government of Aleksandar Vucic, member of Milosevic's regime, who in the recent years pumped out absolutely incredible amounts of money out of the country and is a de-facto dictator.
If you ask people who remember living under Milosevic about how it was, they all say the same thing - bad in some ways, but certainly better than this, and that he was a "little kitten" compared to the current fully criminal organisation.
Umm, people of which ethnicity?
What are the strikes even against?
Do they seriously think that after Iran shot all the street revolutionaries, another group will come forward and collapse the government?
Are they treating Iran as Big Serbia? It's a very different situation!
Or is this just for the Posting?
Is that Islamophobia?
If something causes harm, I’m allowed to dislike it.
“Phobia” is an irrational fear. For the Iranian people, it’s perfectly rational.
Seems like it. I can't imagine what else they might try for.
I suppose USA might think some shock and awe will result in iran making concessions at the bargaining table, but that seems unrealistic to me.
> No more Iranian nuclear program? There barely was one before.
That seems very debatable.
> Keeping Israel safe? It's been an open secret for years that Iran is not a real threat to Israel, because any action it took against Israel would be existential for Iran and its leadership.
Well they did take action against israel (you could say they were indirectly responsible for oct 7). Now they are facing said existential threat.
---
Ultimately though. Iran has been a major threat to both israeli and US interests, largely by funding proxy groups that take violent action against those interests. That's your motive for a war.
Iran is currently weak, facing multiple internal and eexternal crisises.
A war is happening because there is a limited window where iran is weak but the window potentially won't remain. That's the reason behind a lot of wars in history.
[0] https://www.btselem.org/topic/apartheid [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Palestinians
Israel is definitely not the ancestral homeland of the Arabs, and Wikipedia cannot change that.
Ethnic Arabs are from the Arabian peninsula. Islam's expansion started a slow process of Arabization whereby indigenous people in lands that ended up under the control of the Muslim caliphate/empire started speaking Arabic (mixed with their local dialects) and adopting aspects of Arabic culture, not dissimilar to the previous process of Romanization and Hellenization from the Greeks and Romans.
TL;DR People who today call themselves Palestinians are biological descendants of ancient Jews and other peoples local to the region of Palestine who eventually converted to Christianity and/or Islam, some remained Jewish, started speaking Arabic, and never left the land.
That's what genetic studies and history converge on, and what the early zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion also happened to believe in (Ben-Gurion wrote a thesis on this subject), until it became inconvenient for Zionism to continue to do so.
Syria: 90% Arab
Jordan: 95% Arab
Soudi-Arabia: 90% Arab
Egypt: 99.7% Egyptian
I love how you turned the elimination of hundreds of religions and ethnic groups into some beautiful cultural influence.
But go ahead, tell me how Israel is an ethnic supremacist state and how the Palestinians are the REAL Jews.
>Ben-Gurion, along with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (the second President of Israel), argued in a 1918 booklet (written in Yiddish) that the Arab peasants of Palestine were not descendants of the Arab conquests, but rather the "remnant of the ancient Hebrew agriculturalists".
If you'd rather modern science, then there are genetic studies out of Israeli universities leading weight to this hypothesis (they tend to not get much attention among modern zionists as you can imagine). It's also the general consensus among historians of the region, inside and outside Israel. It's not really a contested position amongst academic historians.
>I love how you turned the elimination of hundreds of religions and ethnic groups into some beautiful cultural influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabization
It was not always a clean process, varied a lot by century and location, but on the whole did not involve ethnic cleansing or massacres of ethnicities. The percentages of Arabs you quote above are, again, people who started calling themselves Arabs after cultural shifts, and not, as you seem to believe, a result of mass migration of ethnic Arabs from the Arabian peninsula to replace the local populations.
I don't think we have much else to exchange in good faith on this topic, so I'll leave you here.
> The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.
Which is why there are plenty of racist laws like this
You can view it as racist, you can hate it, you can want to see Israel destroyed in favor of yet another 100% Arab country, it really doesn't matter, because the fact is you're all hypocrites who only have the safety that you have because of genocides, brutal wars, land capture, regime toppling and forced conversions. That's the only thing we learned from the rest of the enlightened world. Kill, destroy, erase, force convert, and somehow be deemed a beacon of freedom and democracy.
In real life, Israel is more ethnically and religiously varied than all its surrounding countries, and non-Jews in Israel have rights that even I, as a Jew, don't have (such as freedom of religion). Jews are a minority in the Galilee, and there's no law for the Judaization of the Galilee.
Only for dc/marvel-shaped brains where there are evil guys who do bad things, and they're opposed by good guys who spread goodness.
> to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population from their ancestral land
Like after creation of Israel, Arabs motivated (often violently) Jews to leave their homelands and move to safe Israel, thus proving zionist ideas to be right. And then wonder what people support these zionist ideas now? Any ideas? :-)
So we agree that the first move in this conflict was a 20th century European nationalist group setting up a new state by force in the middle of an inhabited nation? With the blessing of the colonial power in charge.
Doesn't defend what happened to Jewish people in Egypt and Lebanon, but certainly puts some context around it.
As for the depopulation of Jews from Yemen and Iraq, that was Israeli policy and they managed it by themselves.
Which context? That zionism is right and it's great that Jews had a backup safe land to go?
> depopulation of Jews from Yemen and Iraq, that was Israeli policy and they managed it by themselves
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Iraq#Pe...
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_anti-Jewish_riots_in_Aden
Arabs started to bully Jews, and thus prove that the idea of a safe homeland for Jews is the right idea. For generations. What a smartasses.
>So we agree that the first move in this conflict was a 20th century European nationalist group setting up a new state by force in the middle of an inhabited nation? With the blessing of the colonial power in charge.
> of an inhabited nation
https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/nation
> a tribe of Native Americans or a group of Native American tribes that share the same history, traditions, or language
They're not native americans.
> a large area of land that is controlled by its _own_ government
Mandatory Palestine was controlled by British.
So it was not an inhabited nation, I guess.
Well, they were offered a partition plan, and instead of further negotiations chose to start a war.
Multiple wars, in fact, and managed to fail all of them.
It's bound to be incredibly successful at accomplishing that goal.
Similarly, wars against Iraq and Afghanistan were very successful in diverting attention away from 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers being from Saudi Arabia, and later on from the funding provided to one or more of the hijackers by Saudi officials. With a certain Ms. Maxwell being asked to join the investigatory committee on the event in question.
The protests in Iran today are almost certainly being extensively backed by the CIA and other US organizations. Do not mistake a minority as necessarily representing much more than themselves. Of course they might (I certainly don't have any particular insight in the "real" Iran), but you could certainly see something similar happening in the US with extreme groups, left or right wing, becoming visibly active if they were able to find a strong backing/organizing power that made them believe that they could genuinely overthrow the government. The point being that the actions and claims of those groups would not necessarily represent the US at large.
But I am willing to change my mind about it if I would see a source on that.
My low effort search suggests no significant oil export to russia https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/irn/partner/r... (2022 data, maybe something changed)
Some people here might not be American or were too young to remember the lead up to the Iraq War, but it was transparently bullshit. Many people knew this. But if you dared say that, supporters would actively ruin your life. The Dixie Chicks were one of the most popular music acts in the US at the time, a country band that broke out of country and was getting huge appeal across the US. They dared to say they opposed the war. Their careers never returned.
Now with social media that isn't completely locked down, some voice of opposition can slip through and assure people that, yes, this is crazy. No, we don't need to blow the shit out of towns across the world. But these social media sites are all owned by government-aligned mega billionaires. They're rolling out AI that can comment and act very, very human and endorse everything the government does. They can auto-police opinions and spit out thousands of arguments and messages of harassment against them in seconds. Soon they'll be autoblocking any sense of disagreement.
It's at that point they can say that this is done to defend America. This is done to defend freedom. This desert country that's too screwed up to even manage its own internal affairs is somehow so dangerous that it's going to destroy the whole world with nukes it doesn't even have so we must destroy them all now. Dear leader always has your interests at heart. And you'll have no info to point to saying otherwise. Everyone who dares question it will be mocked, ridiculed, fired. Even if this administration fails, the tools are being built and laid out for the next, and I really don't know how humanity will overcome it. And I hate that I can't have optimism in this situation.
This discussion is one where it's worth looking at commenters' histories. Many have several pages where the bulk of their posts are defending Israel, saying war with Iran is necessary, and various related things. It's kind of spooky
How do you know?
>No other military in the world could have executed an operation of such scale, complexity, and consequence as Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER. Yet the Joint Force did so flawlessly and obliterated Iran’s nuclear program.
https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/23/2003864773/-1/-1/0/202...
https://youtu.be/SxqipJgtTdk?si=YfWRzjcflhWHR276
(Note: Iran did move some stuff away before the attack)
Wesley Clark: "We're going to take out 7 countries in 5 years":
Decoupling from China while taking out China’s allies is the overarching foreign policy.
I believe the calculation is this is Israel’s last best window of opportunity to leverage the declining American empire with a compromised asset in the White House. The time to strike is now, since in 10 years US military power and US political will in support of Israel will likely be diminished.
Not in the sense of "I don't ideologically agree with our decision to do this," but in the sense of, "I do not see how this accomplishes any ideological or practical goal."
What are they trying for? Regime change in Iran? No more Iranian nuclear program? There barely was one before. Keeping Israel safe? It's been an open secret for years that Iran is not a real threat to Israel, because any action it took against Israel would be existential for Iran and its leadership.
A US president who vocally and repeatedly promised he would not start new conflicts keeps starting them, and there's not even a reason. It's infuriating. I have my partisan opinions, but that should not be a partisan statement! It's just disturbing!