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Originally Posted by ceres
Quite, it would be nigh on impossible to "justify" any sort of action in Iran.
I say let them tinker with the nukes and cross our fingers for another chernobyl.
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our government can claim we are in the middle east to prevent terrorists from getting wmd. in which case now that we've spent thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to defeat one of the few middle eastern countries with no wmd program, it's pretty clear we're being led by incompetent ****s. few people want to follow incompetent ****s to war.
or they can claim (as they are) that we are in the middle east to spread democracy, in which case taking out a democracy surrounded by authoritarian regimes looks a mite silly.
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Originally Posted by Marilyn Manson
I think the US view - despite whatever criticsms you may want to throw at it - is focused around liberal democracy, instead of token democracy dominated by Islamic fundamentalism.
I would hardly describe a country where you can be publically executed for being homosexual or even voicing 'subversive' views as being anywhere near western standards.
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oh i agree that it is a fundamentalist shithole.
the problem is that in this case 'liberal' and 'democracy' are mutually exclusive; if you let the people vote on the issue they would certainly vote in favor of executing fags. and so on. so any extent to which we liberalized them we would have to remove the democracy in equal proportion. now obviously we could set it up so that it would appear that they were voting on the issues that we had already decided for them like we do in iraq*, but it wouldn't work as well. in iraq, even if we only let them vote on a few trivial issues, we can still justifiably claim they are more democratic than they were before. and it doesn't hurt that the iraqi people are much more liberal to start.
*it's possible that even if every single iraqi who showed up to vote for the new constitution (and there was likely somewhere in the 60s turnout) voted against it, it still would have passed.