First "Retaliation" from Iran for ban

[Dill]

(02-03-2017, 05:49 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: True, but I am pretty sure most of that has arisen from Iran making no qualms about wanting to wipe Israel off the map.

Iran wants to nuke Israel --> US wants to bomb Iran --> Israel wants to destroy the US --> US politicians campaign on keeping Iran in check/not letting them get nukes.

..is at least the way I thought it was.

The root of hostility between the US and Iran goes back to '53, when we helped depose a democratically elected leader who threatened British control of Iranian oil. We installed a dictatorial Shah who secret police killed and tortured thousands with US backing, creating a mass of opposition to the US. When he fled the massive anti-Shah and US demonstrations (the result of his and our policies), and the banned Ayatollah Khomeini returned, newly formed Revolutionary Guards took over the US Embassy.

I am not aware that Iran wants to "Nuke Israel"; So far as I know, they would like the current government of Israel to be dismantled.  And they have willingly given up a nuclear program, unlike N Korea.

I see a vast difference between Iran and N Korea. For one thing, Iran has a large number, perhaps a majority, of people who would like a more liberal gov. and would like Iran to be part of the world economy. Under Obama, our foreign policy goal was to punish the conservatives there, prevent their getting a nuke, but also to empower the "liberals" and moderates by rewarding their policy influence, whenever they had it. The idea in part is to make sure the population benefits from integration into the world economy and suffers when not. That produces internal pressure to put moderates in power and keep them there.

Nothing like this is possible with North Korea, which is hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, with a population under the most extensive mind control which has ever existed in a modern state, and a paranoid leader, who learned the lesson of Iraq for developing countries.

One of my worries about Trump/Flynn is that they will wade into the foreign policy arena now to "show strength" instead of "weakness"--with the result that moderates within Iran lose the power the were gradually gaining.

One consequence could be that Iran, with 150 billion fresh dollars, could back out of the Nuke treaty and just start rebuilding their bomb program.  Were that to occur, they might have a bomb in less than a year.