Given that the Persian Empire was Sassanid and Zoroastrian, not Islamic, that would seem to be obvious. But not to Bogey.

They have made some headway of late in Iraq, thanks to the U.S. invasion and the mullahs have also been able to consolidate their position within Iran thanks to Bush’s folly. But these gains are temporary.

I’m sure they will send some thank you cards to you soon enough for that little bit of temporary alliance aid.

Ultimately, the Iranian people will reject theocracy simply because it sucks.

It is always nice to see some soup sucker in the Western world talking about starving North Korean peasants rejecting theocracy and autocracy simply because starving “sucks”.

You have no idea of the realities of power, Bogey. You don’t know how to get it, how to use it, how to maintain it, nor how to fake it.

The Iranian leadership has indicated no desire to rebuild the Persian empire, though I would assume there a some elements of the country’s elite that envision that, just as there are in every country on the planet.

As you suggest, the Iranian leadership is more interested in spreading Islam and theocracy, which, in fact, overthrew the Persian monarch.

They have made some headway of late in Iraq, thanks to the U.S. invasion and the mullahs have also been able to consolidate their position within Iran thanks to Bush’s folly. But these gains are temporary.

Ultimately, the Iranian people will reject theocracy simply because it sucks. It will probably take many years and there may even be blood spilled, but the model is doomed by its own contradictions, not by any puffed up, now ludicrous, threats of U.S. invasion. Such a move would only extend the mullahs’ reign, as they would surely capitalize on the ensuing depredation and chaos.

On the question of whether Iran’s leaders could be trusted to adhere to negotiated agreements, we can never completely trust anyone, and certainly not ourselves. The U.S. government has a long history of breaking treaties and agreements and, in Iran’s case of violent overthrow and, then, leaving allies in the lurch.

There needn’t be any trust in negotiations. The assumption on all sides must be that each will proceed only on the basis of self-interest and if those interests change, so might the willingness to adhere to the agreement.

That’s a weakness of all diplomacy. But it’s also reality. If you can fully trust the guy across the table, you wouldn’t find yourself in need of diplomatic negotiations in the first place. You’d have already understood each others’ interests and found an accommodation.

More important, uncertainty features largely in the alternative to diplomacy as well. If we invade Iran, how do we know we’ll destroy the WMD capability? Perhaps the result will be that the WMD infrastructure will actually be delivered into the hands of terrorists, rather than blown to bits in a “surgical” strike. Maybe it will unfold much as Iraq has. After all, the latest intelligence on Iran is that they in fact are NOT pursuing a nuclear weapon. Or maybe a bombing and invasion of Iran would actually go worse than the invasion of Iraq has. That is actually possible, though admittedly the failure would have to be totally devastating to make that grade.

Indeed there is no sure thing with diplomacy, but it’s a lot more certain than the alternative.

Ok, Bogey, you made an honest attempt to answer my question. Good on ya, as the Aussies say. Now, as for your comment quoted above, let’s talk about that for a minute. First of all, even making the rather enormous assumption that you could even get Israeli and Iranian diplomats to meet, what makes you think that 1). Israel would agree to disarm. Iran is not the only threat it faces (see today’s news), and 2). the Iranians would honor it? Do you understand the concept of taqiyya? Let me explain it if you don’t. This idea, common to all branches of Islam, but especially favored by the perennially-underdog Shia (i.e., Iran), permits the practitioner to lie if that lie will lead to an advantage in the future. It can be personal, allowing a Shiite to hide his true beliefs when among Sunnis or others who might do him harm, or societal, enabling that society (i.e., Iran again) to put one over on the infidel in order to gain the upper hand. This by itself makes any agreement with the cleric-dominated Iranian regime essentially worthless.

I do not believe that anyone at this site thinks Iran lacks a right to defend itself. I certainly don’t. But legitimate self-defense does not include sending the “Special Groups” into Iraq to blow up Sunni markets or U.S. forces, or providing EFP mines to its Jaysh al-Mahdi allies. Those are acts of war, and Iran has not as yet paid any price for committing them. Threatening to incinerate Israel, while not in the same league as actually killing our troops, hardly inspires faith in the purity of Iranian motives.

When we attacked Iraq, we did not also attack Iran. Moreover, we backed Iraqi leaders who, for the most part, were Shia. Our support largely went to Shia Arabs who were not Iranian puppets, but who often had no particular quarrel with Iran. But Iran remains determined to meddle in Iraqi affairs, and is not content to simply have a “neutral” Iraq on its western border. And please don’t rehash the canard about Iran believing itself to be “surrounded” by the U.S. We have very few troops in western Afghanistan, and infrastructure hardly sufficient to maintain those we do have, much less launch an invasion. Iran, which is linguistically and culturally similar to western Afghanistan, knows this very well. Far from wanting nuclear weapons to defensively “secure its future”, my view is that Iran seeks them in order to blackmail its Arab neighbors, force them to reject U.S. aid, and make the Persian Gulf more “Persian” than it has been for centuries.

Having said all that, I would add that none of this should preclude talking with the Iranians. But we should be under no illusions that their “national interests” do not parallel our own, rather, they are diametrically opposed, and that they would almost certainly attempt to cheat on any agreement that they did sign. No, I don’t trust them, and neither should any U.S. diplomat who meets them.

Iran and Hamas do Christmas
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1208/glick122608.php3

Interesting article by Daniel Pipes on an Israel – Iran nuclear exchange:
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2007/11/the-unthinkable-consequences-of-an-iran.html

…. guess what Hyman?

That was nowhere near accurate.

When the news media reports:
1) That Republicans were cutting school lunches when the bill called for 4.5% increases.
2) That Republicans were cutting Medicare by 270 Billion when they were increasing it by 7% per year.
3) slandering our Marines in Haditha.

… these are facts that support my opinion that journalism is dead.

It has been historically proven that if you don’t care what happens along a bordering nation, so long as that nation is destabilized and weakened, then enough funds funneled towards domestic rebels in that nation will provide all the troops you need.

The Ayatollahs themselves came to power through violent purges and thus legitimatized that path to power. What has been stopping home grown problems has been partially due to the Iranian revolutionary guards and the effect Islam has had on the initiative and weapons training of individual Iranians. Take both of those obstacles out and the way to a new revolution would be open.

As for domestic opposition… Most of the Left wouldn’t care how many people were killed in Iran, so long as it no longer bothers America or threatens America to get involved into another war. They demonstrated it in Vietnam. All of the isolationists definitely wouldn’t care. Many Republicans would care primarily for US national security over whatever happens to the Iranians themselves. Only a small subset of the American population would care what happened to the Iranians, and some of them only because of the long term detrimental outcome for Iraqi and American national security.

Of course, given how the Left has gutted America’s non-military black ops capacity, Bush was only left with war as his option. It would have been nice had he been given other options, but there was too much domestic opposition to such things as assassination or fomenting of revolutionary cadres in foreign nations at the time.

Of course, today it is no different. People continue to dislike imperialism and war and CIA shenanigans. This is kind of ironic given that if you strip all the tools from a President’s arsenal except the military and nuclear option, the nuclear/military option is the one that tends to get chosen if there is enough determination around to use it. Well, there is sitting around and doing nothing as an alternative but you can only do so much of that before weird things happen.

We will succeed when we succeed, so shut up and get to cheerleading.

As a parting shot, the accurate position of Bush and his supporters post 2003 can be summed up as “Lead, follow, or get out of the way”.

Nothing was required from the opponents of the Iraq war other than to stop obstructing the war effort. People could speak their minds as much as they wanted, so long as it wasn’t to organized obstruction and sabotage of the war effort. But even that was too much to ask for the “loyal opposition” here in America. Such low standards for a mighty nation.

The Leftist media did us no favors when they cheered the fall of Baghdad. They were not asked to but they did so anyway. After all, if the military was given a choice, and they were not, no reporters would have been allowed on the battlefield. It was only Donald Rumsfeld and others who were accustomed to the lightning strike of Desert Storm that gave the media an unprecedented level of access. Although it didn’t get Rumsfeld off the hook once the MSM smelled blood in the water. He needed better shark bait, like what Saddam was using. Certainly Saddam got better quality coverage and better loyalty out of his CNN propaganda employees than Rumsfeld did over America’s so called “free press”.

It is never as simple as matching numbers.

It is also an interesting sign of the times. The purported argument here is that Haaretz is such an unimpeachable source of journalistic ethics and professional efficiency that if they report the same numbers as other news agencies, this would in turn confer upon those news agencies moral and professional support.

This seems like an updated and adapted version of the old favoritism and cronyism that exists in tribal societies. Of course, professional ethics was supposed to jump across petty human vulnerabilities like the need to play favorites but no solution is ever immune to the basic problems of human actions. It would also help if newspapers and reporters actually upheld their particular brand of journalistic ethics, but I suppose that would be asking a little too much out of some people. Even if Greta Van Susteren can meet the standards, she is only one reporter.

I say it is an interesting sign of the times because we have already seen (weak) attempts at criticizing Iraq by using Dick Cheney and General Petraeus’ comments, all of them out of context, in order to copper plate an argument completely contrary to their intentions or meaning.

Propaganda is effective precisely because there is no one “box” you can place it in. A bomb strike is a bomb strike. A nuclear demonstration strike is a nuclear demonstration strike. You can argue about its efficiency, its target selection, or its strategic consequences but what you can’t ignore about is what it is. Propaganda, however, can disguise itself as many things. It can be disguised as reasoned discourse, as ethical challenges and disagreement, as the loyal opposition needing to obstruct things “for the good of the country”, or any number of other covers that provide legitimacy. And the fact that it sounds reasonable and credible is precisely why propaganda is used more often than all the examples of military attacks in human history. You can only make so many bombs, after all, before money runs out. And there are consequences to using those bombs. There are almost no consequences to propaganda and the money required to sustain propaganda operations is measured by the ink bucket not by the worth of gold bars.

Still, the efforts to defend journalism from the evil arch conservatives would go much smoother if journalistic defenders had at least pretended some kind of shame and outrage at Dan Rather and the long line of abuses by New York Times editors and their fellows. But, I suppose that can be excused on the basis that words don’t kill people, while bombs do. People can be far more blase about how they use words than the military commanders charged with surgical strikes using bombs given their intense desire to avoid civilian casualties.

Bogey doesn’t have to make decisions with the lives of untold millions of civilians at stake. Nor does he have to deal with rocket attacks or bombs or being bombed.

Why do you think he should know such “topics” and “facts”, Baklava? Why do you think he should even care?

Because Iran needs nukes for offensive uses, not for “self-defense” unless self-defense is only a euphemism for “killing enemies”. And if all else fails, Iran is a problem because the US considers them a problem and Iran considers the US to be the same.

This should seem obvious to people that if Israelis don’t get international or American sanction for the intentional killing of civilians that Iran should not get intentional support for acquiring weapons designed to kill civilians intentionally. The deterrence value of nukes for Iran’s self-defense is not that it would affect US military operations all that much. They could wipe out a US base, but it would not cripple logistics or punitive expeditions. The self-defense component for Iran rests in the power of the nuke to obliterate civilians in the millions, something which will force the US to take a passive stance, ala Pakistan. Since the United States cares about other people’s civilians far more than the national government of Iran or the media propaganda organs of Europe and Arabia, this allows Iran to boost their “self-defense” capabilities. Not from nukes, oh no, but from conventional invasions, trade limitations, sieges, blockades, and various other inconveniences.

The inability to see other people’s viewpoints is a notorious defect of Leftist and pacifist tendencies. It tends to produce quaint cycles of violence that never really end except with major bloodbaths.