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| ▲ | azinman2 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Disparaging? They literally chant death to America. Is that not also calling for its destruction? | | |
| ▲ | lunarboy 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm sure the decades of CIA meddling in the Middle East and endless wars had no effect on raising generations of US hatred. To hit someone, then call them dangerous when they say "I hate you" is real hero stuff | | |
| ▲ | maximus-decimus 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Okay so assuming the U.S. is 100% responsible for Iran wishing death on them, what do you think the U.S. should do? Let Iran make a nuclear weapon and nuke the U.S.? Or are you arguing Iran is harmless despite openly wishing death on the U.S.? | | |
| ▲ | HEmanZ 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Why in the world do you think they would use a nuke on the US? Why do you think they would use it at all? That is utter suicide. This is Iran, not ISIS (something a lot of Americans don’t know the difference between). Their stated goal, and the only goal that makes any sense, is to use it for deterrence. Attacking any major power unprovoked like that would wipe them off the face of the earth. Just like if Israel tried to nuke Russia or something, it would be complete suicide. They know that without nuclear weapons to defend themselves, they will be conquered and the current regime will be overthrown, it’s only a matter of time. They don’t have the military power to resist being conquered by the major world powers. But some nuclear bomb would be enough to deter conquest (as it would have probably deterred Russia from attacking the Ukrain). I think Israel has legitimate fears here, but with enough military capacity and a strong alliance with the US attacking them would also be suicide. Attacking basically anyone around them would be suicide. Get your news from somewhere other than Fox. This isn’t “evil bad guys want to kill everyone”. This is “theocraric dictatorship doesn’t want to get conquered/overthrown by a major world power”. | |
| ▲ | mjburgess 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/10/iran-saudi-ara... What the US was doing before Israel blew up its efforts. The idea that iran has any interest in using nuclear weapons is so absurd that it's incredible any one could take this propaganda seriously. Every relevant country has at least second strike capabilities against Iran, so it would be suicidal in the extreme -- it's also highly likely that the handful of nukes they'd have would be mostly intercepted. They haven't even developed second strike themselves, so they'd almost certainly lose any nuclear capacity on first attempted use. Iran's capacity for nuclear agression with nukes, is tiny. Iran having a nuclear weapon would be one of the most stabilising outcomes in the middle east, as it would prevent israel (which is the most violent, destablising state in the region) from acting with impunity. This is why israel has, for 30 years, been complaining that iran is "months away" from a bomb, and why for 20 years its being trying to precipitate a war to drag the US into. Iran having a nuclear weapon is the best possible outcome for global security, precisely because its the only configuration of events which prevents israel from waging wars of aggression on its neighbors (syria, iran, et al.). | | |
| ▲ | Gareth321 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > What the US was doing before Israel blew up its efforts. So... nothing? > The idea that iran has any interest in using nuclear weapons is so absurd that it's incredible any one could take this propaganda seriously. When a country repeatedly calls for the genocide of nations and peoples, over decades and various leaders, and funds dozens of terrorist groups which carry out unspeakable acts of depravity and violence against said peoples, why on Earth would you think they don't mean it? Why would having more destructive power suddenly make them less violent? Your logic doesn't follow at all. It's clear you have little understanding of the various ways in which Iran has waged war on its neighbours over decades. Them having a nuke would merely enable them to become far more bold in their covert and overt attempts to cleans the world of their enemies. | | |
| ▲ | mjburgess 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > nothing So signing treaties, negotiating, having mass inspections, economic cooperation -- this is nothing? As of 2015 the official policy of the US was reintegration of iran into the economic system; trump undid that briefly, but then adopted exactly the same policy until a month ago. > why on Earth would you think they don't mean it? It's disappoing how effectively people are propagandised into offensive action based on the words of foreign nations. Look at what Regan said about the USSR and vice versa, rhetoric much more extreme. At the time people couldnt understand the incomprehensibly insane world-ending rhetoric. Now we have a coherent theory of why leaders do this -- which is that you want your enemies to believe you will engage in suicidal behaviour or your deterrence isnt effective. Here iran has enough missiles to detroy israel, but if it uses enough of them, its quite likely israel would nuke iran. Israel is the roge state in the region who goes around trying to topple regeims, bomb embassies, etc. They are the nation everyone is trying to contain. Iran's rhetroic, and it's amassing of arms is a containment strategy for israel. Israel needs to find it semi-plausible iran will attack, or else Iran is screwed -- because israel will attack. Welome to the world of geopolitics, where defensive behaviour by other countries looks like offensive behaviour if you're poorly informed about the situation. It makes waging wars of aggression, like this one, trivially easy to engineer consent for. Oh well, its the US's own blood and treasure, go spend it if you wish. | | |
| ▲ | Gareth321 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > So signing treaties, negotiating, having mass inspections, economic cooperation -- this is nothing? As of 2015 the official policy of the US was reintegration of iran into the economic system; trump undid that briefly, but then adopted exactly the same policy until a month ago. I was referring to this current round of sabre rattling, but if you're referring to the JCPOA, I should inform you that Iran agreed to monitoring and verification, not only under strictly restricted grounds. The deal did not give inspectors the right to freely roam. Access to military sites remained contentious and largely off limits. Iran never gave access to Parchin, for example. This meant Iran was free to continue their nuclear weapons development program - though of course in secret. Further, the JCPOA unlocked $100B in frozen assets which the brutal dictator Ayatollah Khamenei immediately stole and used to cement his position of power. The JCPOA also lifted oil sanctions which further enriched Khamenei to the tune of $10-30B per year. The JCPOA was commonly regarded as impotent and symbolic at best, and quite harmful at worst. > Look at what Regan said about the USSR and vice versa, rhetoric much more extreme. They both meant it. This is a crucial fact from the cold war. The world really was minutes away from nuclear war. I highly recommend reading the account of Stanislav Petrov [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov], a Russian lieutenant colonel, who in 1983 narrowly avoided nuclear war by heroically refusing to report an apparent missile launch by the U.S. During this period the U.S. formally developed the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine which automated nuclear launches in the event that no one was left alive to retaliate. You use an example of two deadly serious adversaries willing to destroy the world as an example of something we should not fear? | | |
| ▲ | mjburgess 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | They weren't willing to destroy the world. You do observe that sometimes one's own propaganda can backfire, esp. if its runs over years, and create a "middle management" layer of zaelots who arent aware it was for show. So one quite important feature of stabre-ratting systems is that you don't have regieme-change instability where "lower tier zealots" who have been propagandised their whole lives suddenly take power -- because they, like the public, may be unaware it was just for show. You're just repeating decades of US propaganda to me. I know it all. This was just a TV show put on to defend the rise of two empires, the US and the USSR -- the claims about ideology, world-destruction, communism, capitalism, etc. are all propangada. The goal the entire time, of both nations, was to expand their spheres of influence to each other's borders and to contain one another. Here, the near entirity of iran's foreign policy is -- just like that of the US, USSR (and many other nations) -- a containment strategy for an highly militarised adversary. If iran took any other approach, israel would have invaded far earlier. | | |
| ▲ | _heimdall 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | It would be a terrible strategy for Israel to attempt to invade Iran, regardless of what alternative approaches could have been taken in the past. Israel would be outnumbered, fighting on enemy soil, and the logistics and supply chain would be insanely difficult to put in place and protect. | | |
| ▲ | mjburgess 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You cannot obtain regime change, nor end iran's nuclear capacity, without a ground invasion. Everyone involved knows this. So either their state goals are lies, or their strategy is a losing one, or they anticipate a ground invasion. Either way, the choice before israel/us is lose-lose. But of course, it's imperative we take death threats very seriously, so just you know, err.. we.. err.. dont have to... err. dunno. Of course that sentence should be, "it's imperative we pretend to take death threats seriously so that israel's ability to dominate the middle east through wars of aggression is maintained, even if that comes at the cost of the blood and treasure of the US" | | |
| ▲ | _heimdall 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Its safe to assume a state's public goals are a lie, especially during a war. My point wasn't that their stated goals can be met without a ground invasion, it was that a ground invasion fought only by Israel will be extremely difficult for them to win, if not impossible. I'm not sure what your point is about death threats, or what threats you're referring to. Trump has pretty directly threatened Khamenei. The threats I remember seeing from Iran are always vague and pointed mostly at a desire for the Israeli and US governments to die - though dangerous statements to make, I wouldn't consider those death threats. Don't misread me here as defending Iran, both sides in a war are to blame and the history of this problem goes back decades. | | |
| ▲ | mjburgess 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I was referring to the other comment's comments that we need to take iranian threats seriously. However, if israel's goals are a lie -- the question is what they're hoping to achieve. Maybe they thought the US had the capacity to take out iran's nuclear capability and would use it, from the air; or would gamble on that. I'm doubtful. Or they think they can ramp up the escalation ladder to a degree where the US is involved in a full-blown war that wrecks iran as a functional state. This makes most sense. The combined defensive capability of western powers may be enough to protect israel during such a conflict, whilst the US/israel can wage a much more sustained offensive campaign. Either way, going around bombing iran -- civilian areas, oil infrastructure, media companies -- has only one aim: escalation. They are trying to provoke iran into ever more escalatory responses. One has to square israel's actions with what they could plausibly aim to achieve. Everything points towards climbing an escalation ladder towards a US-backed destruction of iran as a functional state. This will, of course, cost the US greatly. However there's very little evidence israel has any regard for US blood or treasure. |
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| ▲ | _heimdall 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Unless I wildly misunderstand the meaning behind the "death to ___" phrase often used by Iranians, it is meant as a call against the foreign government not the people. The Iraniansiranians, or at least the Iranian government, absolutely want the US and Israeli governments to fall, but when have they called for genocide? | | |
| ▲ | mjburgess 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I wouldn't try to analyse any sabre-ratting rhetoric by foreign leaders either way. But if you really want to: start with your own. Google all the times the US leaders have threatened annihilation against foreign nations, threats vastly more credible as a global superpower. One should never take words very seriously in geopolitics. They are 2/3rds designed for domestic populations, to propagandize them (esp. in democracies, which must lie to their publics), and 1/3rds lies for the other side. Serious analysers of geopoltical strategy are only concerned with actions, capabilities and growing capabilities. And they are esp. uninterested in domestic propaganda. Everyone in the US elite is extremely well-aware of this; by pointing to iranian rhetoric now they are just propagandizing american audiences to support a war of aggression which is, largely, against the interests of the US population. | |
| ▲ | Gareth321 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | * "Israel must be wiped off the map." -Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini * "Israel must be wiped off the map." -President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad * "The Zionist regime will perish in the not-so-far future." -Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei * "Our strategy is to erase Israel from the global political map." -General Hossein Salami They have been clear and consistent in their intent. Whether it be rhetoric or their continued funding and training of various terrorist groups in the region and globally. Lastly, I find the argument derisive and infantilising that they don't really mean "death" when they say "death to America/Israel/the West". We all understand what the word "death" means. | | |
| ▲ | mjburgess 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Perhaps when you're done with iran then, you can move on to all other nations whose leaders have wished destruction on their neighbours. You'll find that's approximately all nations to have ever existed. Preferably, you might start with your own. |
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| ▲ | inglor_cz 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Neither of you are wrong. There are genuine reasons for hatred of the West in the Middle East, AND the Islamists are doing their best to whip up that hatred even more and weaponize it. That said, "organic" hatred towards the US is much more common in the Arab world than in Iran. Smarter people who live under totalitarian regimes tend to become distrustful of the message that the regime goons are relentlessly pushing, and if that message is "Death to America", the underground reaction will be "America must be cool if the idiots up there hate it so much". I saw the same with my own eyes in late-stage Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Regime propaganda is one thing, its effect on the people another. It usually works much less than expected. | |
| ▲ | 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | mft_ 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Who is “they”? A representative subset of the overall population, or a group of extremists, possibly performing for the cameras?
Iran was once an open and liberal country; the current government is generally very unpopular. Just as Netanyahu‘s actions do not represent all Israelis, so the Iranian government does not represent all Iranians. | | |
| ▲ | azinman2 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | They is the gov, along with some portion of the population. | | |
| ▲ | _heimdall 33 minutes ago | parent [-] | | That's a pretty broad net though. Is it the whole government you are talking about, or only certain positions? And what is the actual percentage of the population you're implicating here? 5% vs 50% could make a huge difference. |
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| ▲ | netsharc 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Result 3 of 9 for "Death to America". Do you like it when people quote you out of context?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44342393 | |
| ▲ | buyucu 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you blame them. CIA overthrew the only democratic government they ever had, and replaced it with a dictator. |
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| ▲ | karmakurtisaani 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Iran has actually been quite willing to negotiate. It has not withdrawn from the talks, it was the US that did it the last time under Trump. Are you aware that Iran approved of US invasion of Iraq in the Gulf War? It even allowed the use of it's air space. Are you aware that Iran was the only country excluded from the Madrid peace talks of 1991 between Israel and Palestine? To counter this exclusion, Iran strengthened it's ties with Hamas and Hizbollah. Iran is not some insane theocracy seeking of everyone's destruction. The regime is bad for the people, but self-interested just as any other, and benefits very little from full exclusion. | | |
| ▲ | _heimdall 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I didn't say Iran has been unwilling to negotiate or that they haven't been diplomatic at all. The prior comment I was replying to implied that the Iranians couldn't have been more diplomatic than they already have been. That's simply untrue and ignores much of the rhetoric coming out from the Iranian government related to Israel and the US. More importantly, it ignores Iran's involvement with a handful of non-state militant groups in the region. |
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| ▲ | LAC-Tech 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I do agree with the sentiment here, but "no amount of diplomacy" isn't really a description of Iran's government. That's completely unfair to Iran. They had IAEA inspectors in their country and they were negotiating with the US (a nation who has put crippling sanctions on them). Then a country that doesn't have IAEA inspectors bombed them, killing the people that very people who were negotiating with the US. Their message since than has been reasonable; "we won't negotiate while Israel is attacking us". How much more diplomatic would you like them to be? They can't just roll over and take it, or they'll be finished. | | |
| ▲ | crubier 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > How much more diplomatic would you like them to be? I don't know maybe just start by not swearing that your neighbor must be destroyed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Israel_in_Irani... | | |
| ▲ | KaiserPro 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | india/pakistan whitter on about it all the time. As did the french/english. But, if you were near to a country that was busily invading neighbours, run by religious zealots, a huge military had a history of using allies to attack you and is obviously illegally playing with nuclear bombs what would you do? The problem is, that describes both iran and israel. | |
| ▲ | LAC-Tech 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How's your Persian? "Marg Bar <noun" appears to a ritualistic phrase, meaning 'down with': https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/69301/what-do-t... Here they are saying "Death to Khamenei" over power outages: https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/iran/2021-07-06/ty-... Here's a story of a taxi driver saying "Death to traffic": https://blog.ricksteves.com/blog/death-to-israel-death-to-tr... It's also worth pointing out that wanting Israel (the state) destroyed is not the same thing as wanting everyone who lives there to die. I'm glad the Third Reich was destroyed, I'm also glad the German people survived it. | |
| ▲ | karmakurtisaani 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Let's retire this argument already. None of this rhetoric means anything until it's put to action, which Iran has never done. This is something the leaders say to gain popular support by acting like they have an enemy to fight. Similar to Trump claiming Mexico will pay for the wall. | | |
| ▲ | os2warpman 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | >None of this rhetoric means anything until it's put to action, which Iran has never done. Hezbollah. | | |
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| ▲ | _heimdall 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | My point wasn't that they haven't practiced some level of diplomacy. I was commenting on the level with with the earlier comment spoke of their diplomacy, and the seeming implication that they couldn't have been more diplomatic. Calling for death to America, speaking of desires for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, funding non-state militant actors in the region, etc are all acts that inflame and go counter to the diplomacy they were otherwise taking part in. | | |
| ▲ | netsharc 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Result 4 of 9 for "Death to America". Do you like it when people quote you out of context?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44342393 | | |
| ▲ | _heimdall 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're just making my point. Calling for the death of the US or Israeli governments goes against the comment I replied to which attempted to make a case that Iran has been as diplomatic as possible. | | |
| ▲ | lerp-io 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I wasn’t implying they were diplomatic as possible. I was simply suggesting that diplomacy will only get you so far. there is a threshold after which you simply need to have the power and resources to defend your nation from foreign adversaries with whatever means possible, one of which is nukes - presumably a relatively cheap option if u already have the R&D. |
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| ▲ | buyucu 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The rhetoric coming from Iran is very mild compared to the ulta-religious venom coming from Tel Aviv. |
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