As I said, we have lots of reason to bomb them: That doesn't mean we should.

LP

Do you honestly have to try to make some kind of mystical point in every political thread, Mystic?

This, this is the best post.

huh

Yeah, because like the US doesn't have a history of devastating evil countries and rebuilding them into thriving democracies.

ohhh... you mean kind of like how Iran took British sailors hostage and totally got its *** beaten back to last Tuesday? oh... wait thats right! everybody sat with their thumbs up their butts and Iran not only got away with it scott-free but got several bumbling apologies along the way!

...you mean burnt like that?

I recall the Brits telling the Iranians in more peaceful terms "Sod off, we we're in the other wars waters." But then again.

Also, in response to Oh Be Quiet, Iran's president really is a religious fanatic so you can't count on him to rationalize things. Of course some of you Kool Aid drinkers are going to call Bush a religious fanatic but he didn't go to the UN babling Armegedon-esque psychobabble.

I realize that you said "should" in the past tense, but please don't act like your post was really clear on whether or not bombing Iran to rubble would be a good thing.

That said, Lord Kuat's post is still a valid response to whether or not we "should've" blown them up.

Iran's president is not the final word, so to speak, the "supreme leader" (no joke, that's the title) is. Amedadude has much less power than many seem to credit him. That aside, the fact that he is still in office and allowed to run at the mouth is an indicator and an embarrassment, he's less smooth than Bush is. However, I sincerely hope you know the guy doesn't really have any power, and anything he wants can be overruled by the council or supreme leader. God I hate that title.

I think anyone could realize as well that the microsecond a nuke goes off anywhere at anytime, Iran will face the blame as a knee jerk, no matter what. This has to keep at least one of them up at night, because sure as hell they'd be in it so deep they'd be pushed back to post-Mongolian population levels. I really can't see Iran as an uncontainable problem that some of you are seemingly presenting it as.

Seriously, Kirby, FasterDude, etc, what's your rationale for saying we "should have" bombed Iran. Pre-Iraq, their worst offense is support of Hezbollah, which makes them bad but on the same level as some of their neighbors. We have a legitimate reason now (as they are killing our troops either directly or indirectly), but what grievances do you guys have otherwise? Unless you guys just mean bomb their nuclear facilities, however your posts are wonderfully vague, and that is a stretch to justify even in that case.

His meaning seems clear to me, Kirby's, I don't remember the other post. He seems to be saying that, yes, Iran is acting provacatively and we could bomb them using their actions as our rationale but he doesn't necessarily believe that means we should bomb them. In other words, he's acknowledging that they're "bad" but doesn't think that means we should attack them. That's my impression anyway.

I got a distinctly different one. They seem to see Iran was a huge threat before the Iraq invasion, greater than Iraq at least at the time:



Correction, greater than Satan at the time. He has yet to justify his post in any way, so I'll just let him babble on like he usually does.

I really don't get the whole anti-Iran sentiment. Really, they've done bad things, but it's not like they've done anything that anyone else in the region hasn't already done. The nuclear issue is a concern, but that just warrants bombing their sites at the most and strangling their technology via sanctions like we already are.

You know, it's not even the fact that this amendment authorizes military action against Iran that bothers me. At some point we're probably going to have to use military means just to get them to stop screwing around with Iraq. It's the fact that we've given such an open-ended mandate on Iran to the same administration that gave us "the Vice President is in the legislative branch" and "there's no express grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution." These guys are absolute masters of wildly creative interpretation, and the way this is worded they could easily treat it as authorization for an invasion.