Is the US position on Iran justified?

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indeed

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[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

"Beer - the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

If I may:

Israel's creation was the end result of decades and decades of work at any variety of levels to deal with the problem of people being abused in an endlessly and paradigmatically pathological situation, and the process itself went through so many advances and setbacks that the only thing you could say about it by the end was that some people were happy and some people weren't. It's taken an unimaginable amount of grief to get the Palestinian position - those people who were displaced in the process - to be taken seriously, as real human beings whose real lives were affected. That seems to be where things hang today.

There's no denying the US and UK complicity in keeping the Shah in place through all those years, suppressing democratic Islamic reforms (yes, these are a possibility), nor the resentment that was both real and something to be exploited by professional agitators.

Nor is there any denying that many people in the White House would love to see the US finally become the theocracy that they've always dreamed of. I've had to listen to Beltway evangelicals for the last ten years go on about it in every possible way, and now that their dream is within reach, they've been kicking into overdrive (as I've been sinking into deeper and deeper depression). Germany teaches us that the most advanced industrial nations can sink into the deepest barbarity. Nobody should be naive about this. It's already going on.

As far as the experience of living in regions torn by religious or ethnic conflict goes, that's really neither here nor there in a way, since not even the participants themselves, I believe, have a really clear idea of what's going on either. It's all tunnel-vision. I do like to think, though, and I'm sure this is my own prejudice showing through, that we can feel marginally better about the perspective we bring when we know how much we have to suss out, and how unattainable some of that will be. I've never had a sustained conversation with a Dalit in India - they'll never have the opportunity to learn much English, and my Bengali sucks - but I have had enough conversations with people in India who have had those conversations, and I am at least a little relieved to know that people are on the job of pulling it all together.

I don't know why, though, we have to keep getting mired in this epistemological bog. The experience of any other person is ultimately inaccessible in immediate terms, whatever qualifiers might get slapped on them.

[SmoothedShredder]

I once drempt I was a tit-mouse on the run from a Barn owl... thats gotta count for something...

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I hate when I get eaten by barn owls. Especially the getting-eaten-up-whole-and-having-your-bones-puked-out-afterwards bit.