What has happened to us? 9/11, sixteen years on...

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Originally Posted by King Of Dirk

Really. Want to survive? Don't pick a fight. The decision is made by the aggressor. It's not the only reason you will never, ever break into Ted Nugent's house, but it's certainly one of them.

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I have problems with this.

Various countries possess nuclear weapons. These weapons have the capability of up ending life as we know it, or at the very least causing considerable death, destruction and suffering. Visiting Hiroshima is a real eye opener.

If the United States decides that a society should cease to be, as, in the view of its leadership (currently grossly inept) someone else has engaged in an act of aggression (which act is likely to be contested in any event, noting the dispute over where the drone was flying for example), there are likely to be grave consequences for the rest of us. Would obliterating Tehran actually be worth it? Would it stop there? What if others elect to respond in kind? You can see where this is leading.

I don't want to my children die on account of what amounts to childish school yard aggression, or to further some of the imperatives listed in that William Blum article.

An eye for an eye leaves the world blind.

Seeing this thread is about 11/9, for all his faults, one thing we can be thankful for is that Bush was restrained after the event and did respond in a way that would have lasting consequences for the rest of the world. I do not have one iota of faith that the current occupant would be quite so restrained.

I will only point out the Bush 2's response was based on a false premise, and resulted in the death of more than a million innocent people.

Let's have a little poetry:

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Originally Posted by ides1056

I will only point out the Bush 2's response was based on a false premise, and resulted in the death of more than a million innocent people.

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Minor correction: It was based on lies and blind vengeance, with no concern for the human costs, never mind the regional or global destabilization that would result. I don't even believe that our usual fantasy of being a righteous force for good, or our pursuit of resource hegemony, were part of the equation. It was an ancient, simple and vile recipe: lies and vengeance.

If we allowed other countries to use our calculus then Iraq and Iran (and a whole bunch of other countries) would be justified in blowing our fleet out of the water and our Air Force out of the sky. I'd prefer that we grow some wisdom instead of going down that road but we don't seem to understand anything but brute force, unwisely used. It will be a great day when the military forces of other countries have the horsepower to make us a lot more reluctant to flex our muscles and act like schoolyard bullies.

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Originally Posted by King Of Dirk

I fear you haven't read the post to which I was replying, nor my first post in this thread (to which BBB was replying). Please give it a try and see if you still think I am suggesting President Trump adheres to (or understands) jus ad bellum or jus in bello.

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Thanks for pointing it out, but I still find it a shoddy example unless the point you're trying to make is proportionality of response no longer matters. The President is actively and openly discussing the annihilation of another nation that has not directly attacked the United States. I agree with your points on more selective disengagement, but being viewed as the neighborhood but isn't exactly the best way to walk through geopolitics.

I agree. Bush also wanted to distract the public from his ties to Enron.

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Originally Posted by ABiCi

I think that just confirms that when it comes to ignorance you definitely fall into the "willful" category.

When the data from the broadest variety of credible and regarded sources all consistently contradict your opinion you incoherently scramble to shoot the messenger rather than acknowledge fault and change your mind.

It is incredibly ironic that you would do this under the guise of an apparently superior rationality, with a greater understanding of social scientific methodology that leading experts across a variety of institutions whose sole purpose is to create meaningful and usable statistics, instead of, as is actually the case, the purely irrational denial that it actually represents.

This is brazen and unrepentant intellectual dishonesty. You might be doing it well enough to fool yourself but I don't think any one else is particularly convinced.

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well said. I also do not like this rush to suppose highly educated folks who have studied things their entire life led by passions are all led askew by some magical bad entity with money to fund the project. its just not how this goes down most of the time. could it maybe be that some folks who do research do so independently of the funding sources opinions? could it maybe be that some funding sources do not require bias results? could it possibly maybe be that some of these experts actually have more integrity than the rest of us? im married to a doctor and this idea that normal people have that doctors are in pockets of medicine companies is wrong, stupid, and dangerous. some doctors are morons and are convinced by money or smooth sales people. the vast majority are above such BS. the general public's inability to comprehend this has always made me shake my head. why on earth would someone study that long just to have some young douche bag sales person tell them how to do their job? its not realistic. not even a bit. most of these folks who study science do so out of passion, and desire, and i choose to believe them rather than the average slightly clever person who can repeat what they read in a few articles once.

i dont know what specifically this is even about, but people are fanatics, the stupider they are, the more they must be part of the team. it goes for left and right both. folks who blindly adhere to any dogma are weird. not just the left or right, the religious are agnostic. why do folks always feel the need to point out what one side does, when in reality its a human thing, not a team thing. people like o do this with man and woman too, as if we are all that different. im not buying this left right thing, you guys can have it. think as a person, not as a direction, that will help a lot more when deciding things for other people, not for constructs made by people. left and right are not real things, nobody fits in those boxes well enough

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Originally Posted by theflashunc

Thanks for pointing it out, but I still find it a shoddy example unless the point you're trying to make is proportionality of response no longer matters. The President is actively and openly discussing the annihilation of another nation that has not directly attacked the United States. I agree with your points on more selective disengagement, but being viewed as the neighborhood but isn't exactly the best way to walk through geopolitics.

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I agree with you. I should probably abstain from these chats, as to your point I usually don't spend enough time on them to flesh out the geopolitical nuances, in part because I don't feel it worthwhile to substantiate and footnote everything I assert in a vain attempt to convince anyone of anything. Nothing I could cite would change your mind, and no fewer than one of us knows it.

I do not support the President's behavior on this (or almost any) issue, I don't support military action against Iran, I don't support the deployment of more troops in the general region - or the maintenance of current troop levels in the region, and if I'm fair I must admit I'd expect the United States to shoot down/destroy an Iranian surveillance platform that was within shouting distance of whatever demarcation of sovereignty it felt like asserting that particular day. So although I think Iran's actions (if in fact Iran is responsible) are technically a violation of whatever, I can't decry their actions too much if I hope to minimize my own hypocrisy.

That the United States is perceived as a bully is unfortunate, but I concede it's true. I'll also concede that the United States bears most of the blame for that perception. Some, albeit a small percentage, is due to the extent to which the United States has been willing to undertake actions that also benefit other nations that do not participate - at least not visibly/publicly - in such actions that imbue Americans with such reputation. That willingness is unwise and naive at best. America should reconsider its role. I have read enough books to understand the interconnectedness of the global economy and the degree to which the safety and security of other nations and regions benefits the United States as well, but I'm not worried enough about proving my bona fides to you to spend paragraphs dropping names of white paper authors and referencing think tank colloquia. To cut to the chase, after all those syllables we can pretend I wrote, I still think some withdrawal from these machinations is worth the potential reduction in America's general standard of living/ability to deploy capital.

Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program, and, despite the adorable contention of the previous administration, has been doing so in an uninterrupted fashion for at least 20 years. While I believe such a program makes the planet inherently more dangerous, I am not too dense to understand it is in Iran's best interest to do so (or at least that a reasonable person could come to that conclusion, to the extent that a reasonable person could ever conclude that yet more nuclear weapons added to the global stockpile is in anyone's best interest). I do not support preventive military action. We can argue until the cows come home about the line between prevention and preemption, and indeed whether genuine preemption is justifiable (I believe it is, but concede the concept is ripe for abuse).

In general, I believe in disproportionate response. At the same time, I believe in a much higher threshold for any response. So while I don't expect you will agree with me on the former, I do hope you will believe me regarding the latter when I say that I think nothing, and I mean nothing, Iran has done, said, or implied to date merits the kind of saber-rattling we're seeing from the White House (and its enablers on cable news). Though Saudi Arabia and Israel are likely salivating at the prospect of American lives being shed as their proxies, to the extent that this is anyone's fight it's theirs - severally if not jointly - and I'd say let's leave it to them to prosecute whatever actions they deem necessary if the aforementioned entanglements didn't implicate the U.S. by association...which of course they do. So I'll simply pine away for a fairy tale world in which the 100 most powerful political and religious figures in each of those four countries (understanding that in all four, the Venn diagram of those two constituencies is damn near a circle) could meet in a cage match in an underground Glasgow fight club and rip each other to shreds, and leave the rest of us to work out our differences like grown ups.

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Originally Posted by King Of Dirk

I agree with you. I should probably abstain from these chats, as to your point I usually don't spend enough time on them to flesh out the geopolitical nuances, in part because I don't feel it worthwhile to substantiate and footnote everything I assert in a vain attempt to convince anyone of anything. Nothing I could cite would change your mind, and no fewer than one of us knows it.

I do not support the President's behavior on this (or almost any) issue, I don't support military action against Iran, I don't support the deployment of more troops in the general region - or the maintenance of current troop levels in the region, and if I'm fair I must admit I'd expect the United States to shoot down/destroy an Iranian surveillance platform that was within shouting distance of whatever demarcation of sovereignty it felt like asserting that particular day. So although I think Iran's actions (if in fact Iran is responsible) are technically a violation of whatever, I can't decry their actions too much if I hope to minimize my own hypocrisy.

That the United States is perceived as a bully is unfortunate, but I concede it's true. I'll also concede that the United States bears most of the blame for that perception. Some, albeit a small percentage, is due to the extent to which the United States has been willing to undertake actions that also benefit other nations that do not participate - at least not visibly/publicly - in such actions that imbue Americans with such reputation. That willingness is unwise and naive at best. America should reconsider its role. I have read enough books to understand the interconnectedness of the global economy and the degree to which the safety and security of other nations and regions benefits the United States as well, but I'm not worried enough about proving my bona fides to you to spend paragraphs dropping names of white paper authors and referencing think tank colloquia. To cut to the chase, after all those syllables we can pretend I wrote, I still think some withdrawal from these machinations is worth the potential reduction in America's general standard of living/ability to deploy capital.

Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program, and, despite the adorable contention of the previous administration, has been doing so in an uninterrupted fashion for at least 20 years. While I believe such a program makes the planet inherently more dangerous, I am not too dense to understand it is in Iran's best interest to do so (or at least that a reasonable person could come to that conclusion, to the extent that a reasonable person could ever conclude that yet more nuclear weapons added to the global stockpile is in anyone's best interest). I do not support preventive military action. We can argue until the cows come home about the line between prevention and preemption, and indeed whether genuine preemption is justifiable (I believe it is, but concede the concept is ripe for abuse).

In general, I believe in disproportionate response. At the same time, I believe in a much higher threshold for any response. So while I don't expect you will agree with me on the former, I do hope you will believe me regarding the latter when I say that I think nothing, and I mean nothing, Iran has done, said, or implied to date merits the kind of saber-rattling we're seeing from the White House (and its enablers on cable news). Though Saudi Arabia and Israel are likely salivating at the prospect of American lives being shed as their proxies, to the extent that this is anyone's fight it's theirs - severally if not jointly - and I'd say let's leave it to them to prosecute whatever actions they deem necessary if the aforementioned entanglements didn't implicate the U.S. by association...which of course they do. So I'll simply pine away for a fairy tale world in which the 100 most powerful political and religious figures in each of those four countries (understanding that in all four, the Venn diagram of those two constituencies is damn near a circle) could meet in a cage match in an underground Glasgow fight club and rip each other to shreds, and leave the rest of us to work out our differences like grown ups.

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This is where we diverge then. Was the multi-party nuclear agreement completed by the Obama administration perfect? Absolutely not. But was it a positive step in engagement with a nation where realpolitik posturing hadn't gotten us much of anything for 30 years? Yeah. It at least provided a framework that if they continued to pursue a course of action, we had multi-national support to taking a different, more aggressive tack when, and if, the deal failed.

And bigger picture, it was a critical cog in our on-going discussions with North Korea about nuclear disarmament. The North Koreans have seen now three times in the last two decades the US engage for disarmament of a nuclear, or WMD program, get a country to abide by those terms, and still engage militarily after to overthrow the regime that negotiated the deal. (Libya, Iraq and now Iran.) As far as the North Koreans are concerned, and there's quite a bit of reporting on this belief within the Kim regime, the attempts to disarm are just phase 1 of a pending US invasion. Once the weapons are gone, the Yankee hordes are coming over the border to topple the Kims. It's not an unreasonable conclusion given prior acts by more predictable administrations. Given the current administration, what incentive does Kim have to make any commitments, much less actually get rid of his stockpile? It may be the only thing keeping him from hanging from the nearest bridge.

The US kneecaps itself every time we pull only the hard power lever to solve our geopolitical problems. And all the current administration believes in is disengagement aside from hard power solutions.

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Originally Posted by theflashunc

This is where we diverge then. Was the multi-party nuclear agreement completed by the Obama administration perfect? Absolutely not. But was it a positive step in engagement with a nation where realpolitik posturing hadn't gotten us much of anything for 30 years? Yeah. It at least provided a framework that if they continued to pursue a course of action, we had multi-national support to taking a different, more aggressive tack when, and if, the deal failed.

And bigger picture, it was a critical cog in our on-going discussions with North Korea about nuclear disarmament. The North Koreans have seen now three times in the last two decades the US engage for disarmament of a nuclear, or WMD program, get a country to abide by those terms, and still engage militarily after to overthrow the regime that negotiated the deal. (Libya, Iraq and now Iran.) As far as the North Koreans are concerned, and there's quite a bit of reporting on this belief within the Kim regime, the attempts to disarm are just phase 1 of a pending US invasion. Once the weapons are gone, the Yankee hordes are coming over the border to topple the Kims. It's not an unreasonable conclusion given prior acts by more predictable administrations. Given the current administration, what incentive does Kim have to make any commitments, much less actually get rid of his stockpile? It may be the only thing keeping him from hanging from the nearest bridge.

The US kneecaps itself every time we pull only the hard power lever to solve our geopolitical problems. And all the current administration believes in is disengagement aside from hard power solutions.

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I don't see any divergence. The multi-party nuclear agreement completed by the Obama administration, that was a positive step in engagement and provided a framework for multi-national support to take a different, more aggressive tack did absolutely nothing to interrupt Iran's development of a nuclear weapons program, and was a critical cog in getting absolutely nowhere with North Korea - who were developing a nuclear weapons program the whole time. I agree with you completely that North Korea's actions are logical, and for precisely the same reasons I believe Iran's are. And I still haven't attempted - or even desired - to justify the current administration's approaches. With whom are you arguing? 'Cause I can't see how it's me, unless you're going to pretend President Obama hindered either country's weapons program. I, for the record, am not under any illusions that President Trump is accomplishing anything in that regard either. Why? Because both of those nations are going to pursue their programs regardless. But hey, you win the argument we're not having, and if later on you want to dispute something I've actually said we can resume then.

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Originally Posted by King Of Dirk

I don't see any divergence. The multi-party nuclear agreement completed by the Obama administration, that was a positive step in engagement and provided a framework for multi-national support to take a different, more aggressive tack did absolutely nothing to interrupt Iran's development of a nuclear weapons program, and was a critical cog in getting absolutely nowhere with North Korea - who were developing a nuclear weapons program the whole time. I agree with you completely that North Korea's actions are logical, and for precisely the same reasons I believe Iran's are. And I still haven't attempted - or even desired - to justify the current administration's approaches. With whom are you arguing? 'Cause I can't see how it's me, unless you're going to pretend President Obama hindered either country's weapons program. I, for the record, am not under any illusions that President Trump is accomplishing anything in that regard either. Why? Because both of those nations are going to pursue their programs regardless. But hey, you win the argument we're not having, and if later on you want to dispute something I've actually said we can resume then.

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Your argument the Iran nuclear agreement did nothing to halt their progress on development a weapon is at direct odds with the assessments of the IAEA and all parties that were part of the accord. Unless you have access to some information that the IAEA and other bodies haven't publicly released, the body of public evidence is, yes, Iran did halt their weapons program and was abiding by the terms of the JCPOA.

I'm curious why you're adamant they are when all evidence of the last several years -- pre-dating the US withdrawal from the agreement -- is that the multiparty agreement worked?

This isn't about winning anything, merely trying to understand the throughline of your position.

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Originally Posted by ides1056

I will only point out the Bush 2's response was based on a false premise, and resulted in the death of more than a million innocent people.

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I was not referring to the eventual response, but the fact that there was not an immediate knee jerk response.

We have no argument, BBB.

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Originally Posted by theflashunc

Your argument the Iran nuclear agreement did nothing to halt their progress on development a weapon is at direct odds with the assessments of the IAEA and all parties that were part of the accord. Unless you have access to some information that the IAEA and other bodies haven't publicly released, the body of public evidence is, yes, Iran did halt their weapons program and was abiding by the terms of the JCPOA.

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Iran says military sites are off-limits for nuclear inspections despite U.S. pressure - Los Angeles Times

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Originally Posted by sine

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Iran says military sites are off-limits for nuclear inspections despite U.S. pressure - Los Angeles Times

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"Inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations organization tasked with monitoring Iran's nuclear facilities, have not requested access to military sites since the agreement went into effect, according to experts monitoring the process.

The IAEA, in its most recent report in June, said Iran was meeting its obligations under the pact. Experts say inspectors rely on intelligence reports and other information to determine whether sites they have not visited are being used for potentially illicit purposes."