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Zonie63 -> RE: Iran (11/11/2013 6:58:37 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: TheHeretic
What are your thoughts on the negotiations with Iran?
I think they are playing the West, and we are all going to wake up one morning in the next year to the news that they have successfully tested a bomb.
Iran has been playing the West since at least 1979. Heck, one can say the entire Middle East has been playing the West since long before then, mainly due to our insatiable thirst for oil and our irrational religious sentimentality regarding the so-called "Holy Land."
They have us pegged and they know how to play the West. They knew how to do that during the hostage crisis from 1979-81, and they knew even better when they persuaded our government to trade arms for hostages so they could get money to fight communists in Nicaragua. During the 1980s, our government was far more caught up in battling the "Evil Empire," which led to a lot of strange bedfellows in the Middle East - a very complicated mess which we're still dealing with today.
We wanted to keep the Soviets out, keep the oil flowing, and protect the Holy Land all at the same time - three objectives we've managed to maintain and balance, albeit shakily. Even though we don't have to worry about the Soviets anymore, the Russians are still potential major players in the region.
We put ourselves into this box, so we have no other viable choice other than to try to talk our way out. We had to talk to the Soviets when they got the bomb, as well as to the Chinese. We thought it would spell the end of the world - and it might still come to that someday. Even nations like India and Pakistan have nuclear capability. We might be able to delay Iranian nuclear development, but I don't think we can stop it in the long run.
Iran may be playing the West, but we've made it easy for them to do that. The West has been playing itself for far too long. However, I think that negotiating with Iran and trying to reach some diplomatic solution is, at the very least, the practical obligatory move at this point. We always have to try to negotiate first before we take it to the next level - if it even comes to that. Other than that, we can try to throw money at the opposition groups and try to destabilize the regime; a little less risky to ourselves than openly attacking them, but possibly more dangerous in the long run if we back the wrong faction - something we've done before in Iran and in other countries.
At this point, we don't trust them, and they don't trust us. Negotiations might seem like an exercise in futility, but we don't have many practical options right now. We're not in as strong a position as we once were in the world, so we may need to play it closer to the vest for a while.
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