We're not arguing at all. Argument is a claim, reasoning, and evidence. You're making claims and partially sharing your reasoning. So far, I'm not even doing that. Ok, maybe I am doing so implicitly. So let me be more explicit. You're justifying a war of choice with analogical reasoning. But we're not 1930s Europe. Iran isn't our regional neighbor. Iran isn't industrially mobilizing. There is no relative balance of economic and martial power between us and Iran. Our national defense is not threatened by Iran. Only 28% of Americans can identify Iran on a map, even when given a zoomed map of the region. You try to make Iran different with the "violent, immoral, cult centered" label. Every powerful nation on Earth qualifies as violent and immoral by any working definition. Statecraft requires violence. Nations lie, cheat, and steal. We're all whores and there is no honor among whores. Cults of personality occasionally gain access to power. But if this is how your analogy works, it's the USA at the top of the global target sort. If you're going to justify American action with statements by foreign radicals, they're going to do the same by quoting US radicals. Our president threatened genocide. The instant he did that, we did a hard turn to 180 from any chance of valid objection to flammable rhetoric. If you think morality matters in war, then you're a supporter of the legal concepts of necessity, proportionality, and the protection of non-combatants. You also believe international aggression is only justified by self defense. We have defiled these principles. If you believe/feel (not think) we're behaving morally, you're not a supporter of any of these things. Not on this sample. You're a supporter of whatever the current US regime wants to do. Might makes right. There's nothing spinal going on here. It's morally amoebic, changing shape as required. No one believes the US or Israel are the underdogs. We're not doing this because we believe Iran seeks nuclear genocide, which would be national suicide. We believe Iran's regime makes rational decisions in their own interest. Otherwise we would not be negotiating with them. You don't negotiate with terrorists. We haven't been inactive on Iran for 47 years. This is a comment that almost unilaterally proves a lack of curiosity, which leads to a shortage of facts and an overage of certainty. We sold arms to Iran in the 1970s. We sold WMD to Iraq in the 1980s to strengthen them vs Iran. Then we gave more arms to Iran to manufacture a stalemate and lied about it. Then we shot down one of their airliners on accident and lied about that too, before paying the victims' families. Then we got the world bank to release their loans if they would vote in favor of UNSCR 678 so we could legally conduct Desert Storm. After 9/11, we put them in the Axis of Evil despite a CIA assessment of zero material involvement in those attacks. They they supported Shia militias in blowing us up in Iraq, and we made this a rational choice by occupying every country bordering them while threatening to wipe them off the map or help Israel do so. Then they elected a moderate president, and so did we, and a treaty was signed. Then we withdrew from that treaty and started assassinating their leaders. Then we bombed their nuke program and obliterated it, and told the world we had done so. Then we started a war with them to re-obliterate it with urgency so urgent that the Constitution and WPR were too slow. The re-obliteration went very well on all sides. And yet here we are, because Hegseth says we have to bomb their ambitions too. I'm not sure how one bombs ambitions, but hopefully it can be done with dumb bombs since we're Winchester on PGMs. Anyone who says we've had 47 years of constant antagonism vs Iran because of terrorism and/or nuclear ambitions is talking straight out of their ass. Which makes sense, since talking shit is the only way to support a shit operation based on shit justification being sold by shit salesmen who are even more shit at doing their jobs and even more shit than that at keeping their oaths. Since you like analogies, I'll offer one for consideration. In the 1970s/80s, the USSR sought to distract its general public from the economic failures of communism by engaging in wars of expansion on its Eurasian frontier. The US recognized an opportunity. Be a stalking horse. Support proxies. Bog the Soviets down and bleed them. So we did, and it worked. Eventually they were humiliated in Afghanistan and stalemated elsewhere. The distractions were played out. Their economy was collapsing and they had to choose between a bloody revolution and a peaceful breakup. The root cause of Soviet collapse was internal political dysfunction creating mass economic unrest. The Cold War was our way to accelerate it. You don't seem open to the idea that our internal politics and economy are pathologically ed at this moment. If you blank that, you can't build a clear picture. Wars are commitments. Once we're committed, adversaries have a way into those pathologies. They can accelerate them. Since 1972, Israel has pursued a strategy of using terrorist attacks as justification for disproportionate and indiscriminate responses that demoralize Islamic populations. After Munich, it became a clash of civilizations to them, and they have no interest in peace or conciliation. These things require trust, and they trust Muslim leaders like Kirk trusts Klingons. To support this strategy, they've courted US politicians, bought shitloads of US debt, and developed a peerless intelligence service that hoards kompromat and uses the resulting leverage to get our regimes to do things that are not in the US national interest. Americans don't understand why we're so dumb, so there is blowback. That blowback is accumulating. Whether we are the USSR 1989, Germany 1939, or hapless European states 1940 in this scenario is for you to ponder. Good talk.
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