No problem. Joe Biden was brought in because he's a genius on foreign policy.

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MY POINT?
Were you not reading?
How about the fact that Iran invades Israel territory all the time, and you blast Israel for daring to fight back to protect their country.
The very words you wrote to say a country has the right to protect its self........you turn around and blast Israel for doing just that.
See the hypocracy in that?

And as far as you acting like Iran can be trusted. We should just let them go about their merry way, and stockpile nukes.
I pointed out from personal contact how far you can trust people from that area. He (the guy i knew) told me he had many friends in the U.S, and all of them felt that same as he did about OUR country. They smile at us, all the while hoping for an opportunity to strike.
Need an example? How about that guy in the army at Fort Hood.
THAT is what we are dealing with. People who don't care what they do. And the more of us they can kill, the happier they are. And they don't CARE if they die in the act. As long as they can take us out.
You can't make treaties with people that have one goal, and that is to KILL us.
I don't see why this is so hard to understand.

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Some of what is happening there 

"Down with the U.S.A.!"

Yeah......but we have NO reason to fear them. After all, they are just "poor little Iran"............with nuclear weapons.

Can anyone tell me the last time we had rallys in the country with people holding "Down with Iran!" signs?

We have done nothing to that country, unless we were provoked. They on the other hand, like i have said, would kill us all if they had the chance.

I, for one, don't want them to get that chance.

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Cheesey, with all due respect, I find it embarrassing that you make such a sweeping judgment of a nation over a few people you've met. So if a black guy shakes your hand and then takes your wallet, does that mean all blacks are lying, thieving scum? This is the exact attitude that got us into Iraq in the first place.

Any time anyone -- in particular, the government -- tries to persuade me to support a course of action using an argument based on fear, I am always instantly skeptical. Fear has been the tool of choice for tyrants, the power hungry, and warmongers throughout the millennia.

On WPR today, they interviewed Ervand Abrahamian, author of A Modern History of Iran, and he made a lot of interesting points.

He pointed out that the fact that the Islamic regime, with Ahmadenijad as its figurehead, had to rig the elections shows that they don't have much support in Iran. Interestingly, too, he said that the regime has particularly little support among the Muslim conservatives. He said that in his speeches, Ahmadenijad actively caters to what he calls the "evangelical Muslims," or in other words, the "born-again Muslims" who believe that the return of the Messiah is imminent. He said these evangelical Muslims make up perhaps 25% of the nation's population, just as evangelical Christians make up about 30% of the Republican Party, so anyone who wants to be in power has to at least cater to this contingent. (For a point of reference, I've had several Iranians tell me that almost no one in Iran is actually religious anymore, which jibes with what Abrahamian says.) He said it is hard to tell how much Ahmadenijad actually believes what he says and how much of it is just demagoguery to mobilize his base of support, just as it was hard to tell how much Bush truly believed his own evangelical Christian rhetoric. I'm of the personal opinion that Ahmadenijad is anything but the madman he is portrayed to be in our media; he is more of a minimally competent talking head backed by inflammatory advisors -- in the mold of Bush the Lesser.

He also pointed out that in fact, Iran's military is one of the weakest in the region -- probably one of the reasons why they want to posses a nuclear threat. Iran spends less money on weaponry than Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and even the little country of Kuwait. However, he also added that because the United States controls a great deal of territory in the region (Iraq and Afghanistan in particular), if Israel attacks Iran through any territory controlled by the United States, Iran will regard it as an act of aggression by the United States and will retaliate accordingly. And as I pointed out in an earlier post, while the people of Iran may not support the ruling regime, they do feel a duty to their homeland, and they will mobilize their militias en masse if we invade.

Is this something we really want to get involved in? Pull our troops out, pare back our military spending, and let's start mending our fences at home.

The purpose of this thread is not in fact to defend Iran, but rather to express my fear that the United States is overextending itself and overstaying its welcome in the world. Whether we like to admit it or not, the United States has been acting in an imperialistic fashion for decades. Every nation that has attempted to amass an empire has eventually fallen. A lot of Americans seem to be unconsciously influenced by the Manifest Destiny ideas of our forefathers and think that we have some sort of God-ordained immunity to this trend, but the fact is we don't. The worst thing about our imperialistic escapades is we can't even afford them; we're doing them on OPM (other people's money), money that will come due sooner or later. I don't want my children to have to grow up in a country that implodes after having grown too top heavy from its own hubris and greed. But I fear that is exactly what is going to happen.

All I have to say is that if my country invades Iran, I will put my wife and kids on a plane for a distant land and I will never return to this country (unless, of course, the CIA decides to drag me back). There is only so much patience I have for a country that refuses to learn from its mistakes.

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I think this is the underlying reason I am so anti-politics. It isn't just tyrants, power-hungry, and warmongers who play the fear card. It's caring and concerned and looking-to-do-good people. IMO the only thing politicians can do well is play upon fears.

If we need the state for anything, it is because of what we fear would happen without it. We fear war or poverty or illiteracy or immigration or commies or fascists or the other guy doing stuff to us.

But in the end, fear is not much of a reason to live by. Fear may keep too many space shuttles from blowing up, but it can't take us to the moon. Fear may be able to delay our death, but it can't improve our quality of living before our die. Fear may be able to prevent a particular robber from taking our wealth, but it can't show us how to create more wealth.

Fear may, sometimes, protect us from some bad things. But fear can't help us aspire to or create good things.

And so a profession whose only skill is, sometimes, making clear to us what we should fear, well, it just doesn't seem to be a profession worth much.

I don't mind any more whether a government "leader" tries to get my support through fear....because, quite frankly, I don't think he has any other way to get it. But because I know his only skill is playing on my fears, and because I know its not good for me to give too much counsel to my fears, I also rarely support such leaders.

Because, to me, they aren't leaders worth following.

I don't worry about what they ask me to do because, quite frankly, I'm not going to do anything because they ask me to. If the only people asking me to give charity were politicians, I'd never give to charity.

I worry about what they might force me to do.

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So kinda like your view on the 9th Ward in New Orleans.. eh.. lol.

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What are you talking about? I made the comment that people were shooting at cops and that I was not impressed merely to point out that the city of New Orleans is not the uniformly noble victim it has been portrayed to be, not to imply all residents of New Orleans are suspect or that New Orleans should not be rebuilt.

I stand by my opinion that rebuilding trailer parks below sea level is asinine, however.

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So....i guess what has happened in the region, or is happening doesn't matter?
You know fully well what i meant. There is a LARGE population of people of Arab descent that hate America. You'd have to be purposely blind to what's been going on in that region to paint me as a racist. There are terrorist cells all over the world, and who makes up the majority of these cells? Answer that question, if you dare. Because if you DO answer it honestly, it will destroy your argument or attempt at painting me for what I am not.
Did I say ALL Iranians are that way? Nope. But there is a large amount that are, and would gladly kill you and your family. If a certain group of people keep doing these kinds of things, I'll call it as it is. "Political correctness" shouldn't protect the bad people.
I call it not ignoring the facts. Not ignoring what's going on.

And Pack93z called you out on your own "sweeping judgement" of New Orleans, and it got your hackles up.
I guess that only works when you want it too, hey? The old "Do as I say, not as I do" rule.
Sorry, but you did the same thing you accused me of doing.
Sucks, doesn't it?

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I've just shown you statistics culled from knowledgable people that show there aren't "a large amount" of Iranians just itching to kill us and destroy our way of life, but that in fact they are a decided minority -- and an increasingly marginalized one at that.

Alan, the idea that there are hordes of people around the world frothing at the mouth, obsessed with the destruction of America, makes no logical sense. Think about it: do you sit around plotting the demise of countries on the other side of the globe? Of course not. You have too many problems of your own to deal with. You have to get up in the morning, go to work, pay your bills, feed your family, keep your house clean, worry about the health of your heart, and so on. It's a rare day indeed you give any substantive thought to those infidels in Botswana or Denmark or Nigeria or even Iran. You don't have the time. What makes you think the people in those countries are any different? If anything, they have to expend even more effort than you do to keep themselves alive. They don't have the time nor the energy to waste on hating a country they will never see in their lifetimes.

As a member of the fedayeen (Saddam Hussein's private soldiers) once said to me, pointing to the U.S. ARMY nametape on my chest: "I don't have a problem you. I don't even have a problem with the United States. If it weren't for those words on your chest, you and I could go into Umm Qasr [the neighboring town], drink a little whiskey together, talk to the bitches, and have a good time. But the fact is, you're in my country, wearing that uniform, so I have a moral obligation as a man to defend my country against you. But am I going to load up a car with explosives, drive it into the street, blow it up, and risk the lives of my own women and children? Of course not! I'm going to take my rifle and shoot at you like a man."

He made these comments in the context of his argument that in fact the vast majority of explosive devices are being set not by Iraqis but by Jordanians, Syrians, Pakistanis, Saudis, etc., who are taking advantage of the situation in Iraq to fight us on Iraqi soil, to forestall us invading their lands. But his words illustrate the point I'm trying to make. As an Iraqi, he wasn't sitting around plotting the destruction of America. However, that didn't stop him from taking up arms to defend his country when it was invaded. Why? Because he's a man. And a man defends his homeland.

And no, I didn't make a sweeping judgment about New Orleans. I made a comment about a very small number of people in the city that -- as I have pointed out in the other thread -- connected to nothing else. The supposed false connections in my argument were erroneously interpolated by people reading my posts, which were addressing separate statements. So that argument fails too.

I'll leave you with some comments left on the Palin article on the Reason website:

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