Goodbye, and good riddance.
If Obama was your defense attorney, he’d plead a life sentence for jaywalking, and call it a “deal.”
Doves worry that the elevation of Pompeo makes conflict between the United States and Iran more likely. They get it backward. We are already in a conflict with Iran, one that Iran has been winning. It was the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran that gave it the resources and opportunity to sow chaos and undermine American interests throughout Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere. What Pompeo can do is shift the conflict into terrain of our choosing and decide it on our terms.
Yup.
Is conflict a bad thing? I’ve stood up to many bullies and they all want to be your friend afterwards.
Many years ago when I was much younger, we had a neighbor who had been a veteran of the war against the Japanese, in fact he’d been their prisoner and had experienced the atrocities most of us are fortunate to never come close to.
For decades after the war Jack hated the Japanese, but scars fade, and in the ’80’s he’d managed put his hatred behind him enough to buy a Japanese ute. So 35 years after his release I guess we can say he’d unloaded most of his hatred of them.
It’s 36 years since the Iran hostage crises but the American right still can’t get over it.
Rand offers this quote:
Iran that gave it the resources and opportunity to sow chaos and undermine American interests throughout Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere. .
In Iraq the US and Iran were on the same side against ISIS, both the US and Iran support the majority Shiite government in Iraq, so I don’t see any big conflict of interest there other than the one in the minds of right wing Americans.
In Syria Iran and the US were on the same side against ISIS, Iran supports Assad while the US would like to see him gone, but the reality is that Assad’s big supporter isn’t Iran, it’s Russia.
Lebanon is a country that is largely at peace, I don’t see any efforts on the part of Iran to change that.
Yemen is experiencing a nasty civil war, It would be nice if both the Saudi’s and the Iranians, who support different factions, would both bugger off, the US has very little at stake in Yemen.
I don’t know why Bahrain is on the list, I would have thought Qatar a more likely candidate for a case of Iran undermining US interests, either way these countries appear to be able to peacefully run themselves despite them supposedly being at the center of conflict between the US and Iran.
If the US right wants some enemies to hate for undermining American interests its #1 Russia, #2 North Korea, probably followed by China and the EU given those countries hostility towards recent US foreign policy initiatives.
The Japanese stopped waging war in 1945.
Iran never has.
Stop being so fatuous.
Let’s conquer and occupy Iran like we did Japan and I’ll be happy to be magnanimous and buddy-buddy.
Yemen is experiencing a nasty civil war, It would be nice if both the Saudi’s and the Iranians, who support different factions, would both bugger off, the US has very little at stake in Yemen.
So there is considerable reason right here to believe that Iran hasn’t changed its ways. We also have its involvement in the Syrian civil war.
“considerable reason right here to believe that Iran hasn’t changed its ways.”
You mean along with Turkey, Russia, The US, and numerous other countries that poke their noses into other nations civil wars?
And Saudi Arabia of course.
Let us keep in mind that Saudi Arabia since the last war with Israel in the early 1970s has employed soft-power approaches over open warfare and it’s never acted unilaterally against an enemy militarily until recently. That changed with Iranian shenanigans in Yemen.
Andrew said “Lebanon is a country that is largely at peace, I don’t see any efforts on the part of Iran to change that.”
Iran founded and funds Hezbollah. The cliche about Hezbollah is that it is a “state within a state”, with its own army (one which is more powerful than the Lebanese Army) and missiles (they now have between 130,000 and 150,000, that’s far more than in the 2006 war, and some are capable of hitting not just Tel Aviv, but Eilat in Israel’s far South). If you google Iran and Hezbollah, you’ll see this week’s news stories are about the missile factories Iran is building in Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon.
If the Lebanese government was building a strong defense with Iran’s assistance, I wouldn’t have bothered posting, but in fact, the Lebanese government doesn’t even have power over much of notionally Lebanese territory, and Iran is funding and arming the terrorists who do control Lebanese territory.
That said, I’m totally for Iran deal, and I’m horrified by the appointment of John Bolton to national security advisor. But that’s another argument.
It’s 36 years since the Iran hostage crises but the American right still can’t get over it.
As if Iran has done nothing during those 36 years.