POLL: When should the USA liberate Iran?

Such an alternative exists, but it's illegal. Go figure.

http://www.hemp.com/hemp-education/uses-of-hemp/hemp-fuel/

 

Not leaving isn't the problem. The problem is that the government of Iraq disenfranchised Sunnis, drove them from public administration and attacked them with the national military.

Bush didn't stop that when he had troop levels capable of carrying out military operations in Iraq.

What is it that you think Obama could do that was so much better than what Bush did? Why do you think Obama could have changed the Maliki administration when Bush could not? Why do you see that change as depending on our military presence? Do you think Obama or Bush would (or should) have used military force against the government of Iraq?

Iran is nothing like ISIL. And, there is no reason to believe they are suicidal. Islam plays an important role in most of the governments in the region. Let's not get irrational about Iran.

 

We cannot withdraw from the world scene without devastating effects, both on the U.S. (therefore Americans) and everyone else. To the OBL types of the world, it'd encourage them more to attack -- they'd perceive withdraw as the U.S. giant being mortally wounded. You're over a hundred years late on this "not going back to isolationism" party, pal.

 

And once the mass graves were found scattered all around the country, did that mean that their judgment of him was proven correct, or incorrect?

How?

In case you forgot, the oil supply from Iraq had been controlled for over a decade prior to the invasion.

For over a decade, the oil from Iraq was only sold through the UN, most of the money seized and given to Kuwait for reparations for the 1990 invasion, and the largest share (over 30% went to Russia. Less then 3% went to the US, and it's price was set by the UN, so was effectively invisible to the world market.

We did not disenfranchise anybody, neither did the Iraqi government. The Sunni were the minority religion in the region, and huge numbers boycotted the election unless they were given major power in the new government.

65% of Iraq is Shiite, 30% Sunni, and the remaining 5% is spread among Jews, Christians, and a few other minority religions.

When the Sunni are only 30% of the population, there is no need to disenfranchise them, they as a rule were already distrusted and most who had the influence and authority to run for office had already been discredited by their connection to the former regime.

Unless you mean the disenfranchisement from forbidding any to participate who had confirmed ties to the former leadership. Of course they were disenfranchised. Not doing so would have been like letting Jefferson Davis run for a Senate Seat after the Civil War, or Hermann Göring to run for high office in West Germany after the end of WWII.

Uhh, yea. Right.

Sorry, even if we turned the entire corn crop right now into making fuel, it would not make a serious dent in the supply and starve hundreds of millions of people.

You need to do less smoking of what you suggest and more research into how inefficient biofuels are.

 

And I'm not advocating the use of nuclear weapons on Iran. Thermobaric weapons should be completely adequate to quickly reduce Iran to a status of unconditionally suing for peace in no more than three days, if the bombing is thorough and comprehensive in scope....

The example you provide of Pakistan and India is an interesting one. I can only observe that India is not primarily an Islamic nation, and that although Pakistan certainly is almost entirely Islamic, it has, and has had, a secular government dominated by its military -- none of whom has ever gone public with a strident message of decapitating "Infidels", annihilating Israel, or bringing about an end-of-the-world scenario, starring the 12th Madi, complete with Blue Turban, and all the rest of that Islamo-Nazi nonsense....

If we are to believe what we've been told, the Iranian nuclear development infrastructure is distributed in so many locations, and sited so deep in underground bunkers that no known weapons technology can destroy it. That's why it makes so much more sense to destroy what's above the ground -- the "low-hanging fruit", if you will. World War II is a full-fledged example of how one can use aerial bombing as an effective weapon against an enemy, and while at first it may seem to be a nice, "egalitarian" tactic to bomb only military targets, that's not how it always ends up being done! What was "humane" about bombing Coventry? What was "humane" about bombing Dresden?

Unless the Iranian nuke workers want to spend their entire lives in these deep holes they've made for themselves, they'll have to come up sometime, for all the many things they cannot easily create for themselves down in the holes. They might want to see their friends and family! They need fresh water; the need sewage facilities; they need medical equipment and medicine -- in short, all the things that a country needs to function in the modern world. It follows, then, that if they want to have a continued "modern world" existence above the ground, as well as below it, they had better forget about trying to obtain nuclear weapons.

 

How? Because it causes instability throughout the world when these OPEC countries mess with things, that's how. Prices of oil rise, therefore prices of food or any other product that has to be shipped rises, that in turn, eventually effects us and everyone else, and these idiots know exactly what they're doing. They do these things on purpose. That's how.

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That's just nuts, IMO. Sorry, but it is. I know a LOT about Iran. You aren't fooling me.

 

It sounds good, Telekat, but I'll bet there are reasons for not using it, besides our government being hesitant to recognize it. I was interested in this, but your article didn't give any cons, and we all know there are pros and cons to everything. I found this article. However, I still think it could be explored and used in some manner, so that's a pretty good idea that needs to be worked on, I think.

http://greenliving.lovetoknow.com/Advantages_and_Disadvantages_of_Biofuels

 

Some of you might find this interesting too.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2015/03/13/obamas-iran-scheme-is-laid-bare/

Excerpt, but please read the article. Thank you.

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No, it is not unjustified. Iran is run by religious Islamo-extremists, whether you want to admit that or not!

 

My only military concern is a foreign nation or nations invading us which won't happen with our nuclear capability. We should withdraw as far as we can and improve our deployment technologies for our nuclear force to improve speed and accuracy and reliability. We could then reform our military for the threats we do have.

 

Israel and Pakistan are also run by religious extremists. So are some other nations without nuclear weapons.

Again, I'm certainly not interested in Iran getting nuclear weapons capability, but the talk about bombing Iran into submission is really no better than our own brand of terrorism.

Who and what do you think would be bombed that would bring them into "submission"? All bombing them would do is prove that they need nuclear deterrence as a matter of their national security. It would end for a very long time any hope of more moderate Iranians exerting political influence on their own government.

As for the very idea of "bombing into submission", one might ask - how did that work on Gaza? There have been three wars on Gaza since 2006. There has been constant choking blockade (an act of war) and denial of movement of persons, of fishing their own waters, of inspection by human rights organizations, of access by the government of Palestine. The slaughter there has been horrific and the assault by Israel has been remorseless, with them even refusing to do as they promised to gain the recent ceasefire.

Sorry. Bombing does not result in submission. It didn't in Vietnam, Iraq, Afg, Syria, Libya, or Palestine. Humans aren't built that way. In WWII, neither the axis nor the allies owned more than they occupied, and when the capacity to occupy ran out, the borders remained the same and authority reverted to the local populations. In Vietnam, 10 years after we left I could book a vacation there. Had we left 10 years earlier, the same undoubtedly would have been true - minus the years of slaughter and radicalization. War has not been a solution.

 

Where is the option that the OP is a warmonger who wants to kill lots of people. He is more a threat to peace than any of those Islamic people he tries to use to justify his hate and bloodlust.

 

that's why one of the options in the poll is to attack Iran even if the nuclear talks are success.

 

The U.S. military protects more than just America. Without the U.S. Navy, our trade would be affected, as would everyone else's. If we step back...the consequences are severe and never really thought out well by isolationists.

 

Iran not on terror threat list:
http://news.antiwar.com/2015/03/16/us-quietly-removes-iran-hezbollah-from-terror-threats-list/

 

How about the USA keeps its nose out of the Middle East altogether?

 

It should also be noted that as oppressive as the current regime in Iran is today the Iranian people are still far better off than when they were subjected to the absolute despotism of the Shah of Iran that the US supported and, that after disposed from power, was protected by the US from prosecution for crimes against humanity that he committed when he was in power.

It can also be noted that the US was complicit in the over-throwing of the democratic government that existed in Iran during the 1950's and the imposition of a tyrannical dictator. Our record with Iran is one of the greatest blights there is in American history.

 

Well we can't win 'em all, can we?

 

That's quite true but the historical US support for tyrannical regimes based upon the foreign policy of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a true blight on American history. It is a foreign policy that someday I hope we will abandon as it goes against everything the United States is supposed to stand for.

 

Iran remains a clear and present danger to the Civilized World. This is why Iran's days as an IslamoTerror State are numbered.

 

Let me say this again:

During that time Iraq was stripped of all control of it's petroleum industry!

It had no control of how much it could produce, what it could sell it for, and who it could sell it to! That was all controlled by the UN. In fact, it's oil was sold for well bellow the world asking price, and money collected primarily went to Kuwait for reparations.

In fact, increasingly OPEC has become irrelevant when it comes to the supply of oil and the price set for it. But the ignorant still think it is important for some strange reason.

Do you even know how many of the top 5 oil producing countries in the world belong to OPEC?

One, Saudi Arabia at #2. Number 1, 3, 4, and 5 are not member of OPEC. And only 4 of the top 10 producing countries are members of OPEC (2, 4, 7, . OPEC is nowhere near the power that it was 30 years ago.

 

Oh really? That's interesting. So the Iraq war was NOT for oil. Lol.

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Bull. The Iranian people and the Iraqi people would be better off if America just took them over.

 

Ahh, got it. Conspiracy nut.

Yea, I forget to a large segment of people, oil and money are the only things that matter in the world. And as long as those items (or something else of value) exists, those will be the cause for everything.

WWII, started because the US did not sell oil to Japan. Gulf War, started because Iraq would not sell oil to the US (even though it was the UN in control of the Iraq oil, and it was Iraq after the war ended). Even the Kuwait Liberation to many was about the US trying to get oil, even though the majority of the Kuwaiti oil went to the UK and Northern Europe (where most of the gasoline fuel was sold under the "Q8" brand name).



Funny how almost none of the interventions by the US over the last 100 years were in countries that had oil, but that is all that some people obsess over.

 

I always thought there was MORE than one reason why we went into Iraq, but I never really believed all the talk about oil. I think a lot of it was plain old fear after what happened on 9/11, but I don't forget that there some things that the government might never let us know. The only things we know are the things they want us to know.

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BTW, my oil comment was supposed to be funny. Hence the winky face. Lol.

 

Sarcasm can be hard to tell in here, but I get so sick of such a response from the "usual suspects", with absolutely no thought behind it. Oil is almost a Pavlovian response with some in here.

There was no one reason for Iraq. The major was the attempts to avoid the UN weapons inspectors, another was the obvious violations of the UN mandated ceasefire agreements. Then add in human rights violations (which many do not seem to care about), the graft and corruption of the UN Oil for Food program (which was known in the late 1990's), and the list just goes on and on and on.

9/11 had little to do with the Invasion of Iraq, other then yet another issue was Saddam giving shelter and medical care to anybody wounded in Afghanistan, and harboring a great many terrorists (and not just AQ operatives).

 

This reminds me of the preamble to the National Organization for Marriage preamble to the Marriage Pledge that Republican politicians flocked to sign that (before revision) implied that black children were better off when they were raised as slaves.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2...ves-preferable-parents-for-african-americans/

Colonialism, which is what you propose, is a form of slavery which is why it is universally condemned today. Iranians and Iraqis are both better off as independent sovereign people than they would be as colonies under the United States. Even the Puerto Ricans today would be better off as an independent nation than they are as a territorial possession of the United States. Puerto Ricans can't vote for members of Congress and have no representation in the US government. They are, for all intent and purpose, slaves of the US government. They might we well treated slaves but they're still slaves of the United States.