Iran "Kicks It Up A Notch"

The Afghan-Soviet war ended in 1989. The Taliban appeared in 1994, and consisted mostly of Afghan refugees who studied in religious schools in northern Pakistan. The Taliban are often mistaken for the mujahedin who fought against the Russians. A common misconception. The Taliban didn't exist during the Afghan-Soviet war.

What I think Iran should do is irrelevant.

 

Strawman.

Nothing to say about the genocidal intentions of Iran backed Hezbollah?

 

I think reality is several orders of magnitude more complex than we on the forum can grasp. There's much we don't know. There's much we don't say about what we know, because it's complicated. However, I'm sure you'll understand my following statement without explanations: the current situation is better for Iran than a withdrawal from the NPT, both on the regional and on the international scene.

 

Question, what should Iran do to stay independend and be able to be anti US imperialism but accepted by USA?

 

Not shouting "Death to America" on every occasion would help.

 

One of the best ways to practice imperialism (and always was) is to 'support' one faction in a fractured state and take over through it.
This is the method the Roman empire used to take over many nations and this is what Iran uses today.
Iran tries to take over Lebanon using Hizabla.
Iran tries to take over Syria using Assad.
Iran tries to take over Iraq through the different Shia faction there.
Iran tries to take over Yemen through the Huties faction.
Do you see already the pattern here ?
Iran is by far the most imperialistic country in the world, inflicting pain and suffering on many Muslim countries.

 

Is IT better when USA threatens Iran with Annihilation?

 

Lol USA does exactly same on even bigger scale

 

All nations with interests outside their borders seeks friends and allies to work with. The difference between Iran and Israel/USA is that in the region, we try to work with groups and people who can actually win an election! Not to install them in power by force. That includes elections even under Israeli occupation (e.g., Hamas), under a system that is inherently skewed against the largest population in a country (e.g., Lebanon, where the Shia are completely under-represented in the sectarian driven electoral formula in that country dating back to the design from old French colonial days, but where Hezbollah and its Christian allies nonetheless won the Lebanese elections) or Iraq (where the "Iranian list" beat the "US list' in successive Iraqi elections from 2004-06 in Iraqi elections under US occupation).

Anyway, these polemics won't get us anywhere. The fact of the matter is simple: any influence Iran enjoys in these countries isn't by virtue of having a near monopoly over the world's financial institutions, not by virtue of having a near monopoly over the so-called 'international media", not by virtue of having a near monopoly in the world's diplomatic corridors, or in military weapons, but because it works with those who are left feeling oppressed by US/Israeli hegemonic policies. That is the source of Iran's influence in the region, which the US/Israel and Saudi Arabia have tried to counter through a host of means, much of it truly disgusting. In this process, it isn't just the countries in the region which have suffered from these US/Israeli hegemonic policies either. These policies have promoted lies and liars in the corridors of power as well as the institutions that prop them up. And that has left these societies to become corrupt internally -- a corruption whose manifestations and the price entail in anything worthy about their societies are clear even now and will become clearer in due course.

 

When did the US threaten Iran with annihilation?

 

LOL. I didn't a discussion about the NPT would require a mystical understanding of reality!

Talking about 'reality', here is something that may fly over your head. But the entire philosophy of Iran, through its poetry, sufi mysticism, its philosophy, even its Shia Jaffari Usuli school of jurisprudence, is ultimately centered around the idea that the reality we perceive isn't the essence of the truth.

 

All the time, often implicitly, but sometimes even explicitly.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/23/trump-obliteration-iran-nuclear-weapons-pursuit-1376744
Trump warns Iran of ’obliteration like you’ve never seen before’

No, this isn't just Trump. In fact, Trump is somewhat 'plagiarizing'.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...totally-obliterate-iran-idUSN2224332720080422
Clinton says U.S. could "totally obliterate" Iran

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/25/trump-iran-rouhani-insults-sanctions-threats

Trump threatens ‘obliteration’ after Iran suggests he has a ‘mental disorder’

 

Some people don't realize this because the news was given only limited exposure -- sufficient to reach its intended audience in Iran, but not to cause enough of a stir in the US. But under Bush, the US specifically changed its military doctrine which prohibited the use of nukes against non-nuclear states to send a message to Iran.
https://larouchepub.com/other/2005/3221conplan_8022.html

The current US doctrine under Trump was also published, and then removed quickly from public view, by the Pentagon further weakening the traditional criteria regarding when the US would employ nuclear weapons, with Iran one of the main considerations in the relaxation of the doctrine on non-use of nukes against non-nuclear states.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/19/nuclear-weapons-pentagon-us-military-doctrine

 

Nothing mystical in my post, sorry. I meant that we don't know half of what goes on in political and diplomatic circles, while politicians and diplomats themselves don't know what other politicians and diplomats are doing. Yet most people are quite sure they know exactly what's happening, when, where, why, and how. We organize the world around us in our minds in simpler, easier to understand models of reality. Objective reality is several orders of magnitude more complex than the models in our brains.

I wouldn't call what humans are doing "quest for truth". I'd call it "the god complex".

 

Well, as much as I disagree with this kind of saber rattling, there's one crucial difference between those threats and the "death to America" chants: the two idiots above threatened to react to certain actions on the part of the Iranian regime, while the latter made it clear that the destruction of the US is one of its main goals just because it's the US.

 

This is the problem.
Quote, Iran "works with"

Iran doesn't work with Taiwan, or Japan, or France, or Germany, or India or Nigeria etc..
It "works with" bigoted, cruel, racist and violent groups. That's sad.
Been reading on Quora about the slow expulsion of Arab Christians from the West Bank.
Down now to half their original numbers. Like the 480,000 Jews driven out of Middle
East countries, you just don't hear about these things in "capitalist" Christian nations. I
wonder why not?

No, I don't think Israel should invade Lebanon. If Hezbollah launches raids across the
border or starts firing its Iranian missiles I think Israel should just push the button and
send that increasingly radicalized, Islamic nation back to riding camels.

 

Yes, and America back the Soviet Union - the nation that joined with Hitler in starting WWII.
And at one stage, America back the Nazis. And America backed the early Taliban. And
America backed Italy. America opened Feudal Japan and helped industrialize it.
This happens all the time, and in most countries, too. It's called shifting alliances and changing
situations.

 

Quote - "Your post is laughable"
Easy to write. Hard to elaborate and justify.

 

Both the "God complex" and the "Self complex" can work towards the quest for truth and also contain the seeds for much of the falsehood and lies that are covered under so much dogma.

In the meantime, the evil deceiver concept used by Descartes to explain the limits of reason to teach truth, where the only truth that it can lead to is "I think therefore I am" was discussed centuries before Descartes by a Persian jurist and scholar, Ghazali. Ghazali, who had at one point become a skeptic, then turned to a more 'fundamentalist' view of religion. His thoughts became the cornerstone of many Sunni schools of thought in jurisprudence, which then basically closed off the 'search for truth' to what could be found in scripture. But another philosophical tradition took Ghazalis thoughts to another direction altogether. It used it to build the foundation for questioning the material manifestation of the world, showed disdain for any literal interpretation of not just scripture but the material world more generally, and professed that we could only search for the essence of truth through reason. Iran's Sufi mystical tradition (which orthodox Sunni Muslims considered a rejection of Islam), Iran's "Jaffari Usuli" school of Shia jurisprudence, and even Iran's more 'orthodox' religious scholars, such Ayatollah Khomeini, nonetheless hailed from a tradition that philosophically rejected any scriptural interpretation of religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ja'fari_jurisprudence

I am not religious, except I do believe in the quest for truth (and faculty of reasoning) as being the light within humans which differentiates them from other species in the animal kingdom which they have evolved from, even if we share the other instincts with those species are governed by those instincts as well.

Incidentally, from a scientific point of view, the idea that the 'material world and its laws are the only thing that exist is itself false. Hence, the ideas about 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' which counter the material forces (including gravity) and the laws of the material world are part of established science. Hence, the quest to find the truth includes, from a scientific point of view, the laws (falsifiable in theory to be scientific) from both the material world as well as the non-material world)

 

You are wrong. Germany, France work excellent with Iran.

 

Iran is now claiming they have just discovered new OIL in what they are estimating as a 50 BILLION barrel oil strike.

 

You must be joking! Destruction of the US has never been even remotely a part of Iran's policy, propaganda, or teaching. That is just a lie. In fact, Iran's most anti-American leader, namely Iran's Supreme Leader, has commented specifically about the 'death to America' chant and what it means. It means down with US hegemonic policies in the region. And that is all.

You can engage in polemics, but the truth is that Iran has always stood against anyone who has tried to establish hegemony in the region. This is an age-old struggle that is just part and parcel of Iranian behavior for over two thousand years of history, ever since the conquest of Iran by Alexander the Great. It informed 8 centuries of Iranian resistance and warfare to stop Rome from conquering the region. It informed several centuries of resistance and warfare to Arab and then Ottoman attempts to dominate the region. It is what is basically driving Iran's policies today.

Look at these maps. They show Iran's traditional realm shrinking overtime in history. But those areas which Iran held the longest, are those which are naturally the ones where Iran still retains its greatest influence.


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Sassanian empire at its greatest height in 620 A.D. (normal domain in the darker shade representing territories ruled by Iran from the 3rd century B.C - 7 century A.D. under the Parthian and Sassanian empires).

Safavid empire (normal domain and greatest height between 16-18 centuries)

Afsharid dynasty (18th century) at its greatest height under Nadir Shah

Iran in the 19th and 20th century

 

Some 'truths' don't change despite thousands of years of history. One of them being that while Iran has always resisted foreign encroachment in its sphere, it has never sought to conquer the West -- not ever since its attempt to conquer Greece ended in failure during the Greco-Persian wars. This despite the fact that the Sassanian empire often held the upper hand in its wars against Rome, capturing or killing several Roman emperor (and having one serve as a tributory) to Iran under Shapur in particular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romans_in_Persia

 

Yes, that's where the missile and nuclear tech came from.