[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
Raise your hand if you doubt Iran is going to get a bomb. I think them getting a bomb is a foregone conclusion. My problem with the administration is that they are arrogant enough to believe they can simply talk them out of it like reasonable people. Iran ain’t reasonable. They’d get a bomb regardless. It just should be made as hard a process as possible. [/quote]
I won’t raise my hand, because I agree with your premise: if Iran is convinced that they need nuclear weapons, and they have the funds and the technology to develop or obtain them, then they will have nuclear weapons. Just like Israel.
Now, if you had said, “raise your hand if you’re not worried about Iran having nuclear weapons”, then up my hand would go. Yeah, they’re Moozlums, and yeah, they sometimes say unkind things about Murica, and yeah, they have had unsavory friends throughout the years. But I remain unconvinced that this translates into a clear and present danger to the United States.
Listen, I live less than three hundred miles from the North Korean border. The North Koreans actually have nuclear weapons, and they actually have delivery systems that could rain nuclear fire down on top of my head if they wanted to, AND they have a legitimate, seething hatred for the country in which I live. You want to talk about insane? Kim Jong Un is as crazy as a mountain of guano.
Do you know how worried I am about a North Korean nuclear attack on Japan, which is several orders of magnitude more likely than an Iranian nuclear attack on the U.S. mainland?
Not at all.
A probability that is orders of magnitude higher than an infinitesimal probability is not worth worrying about, and anyway, as Axl Rose once put it, “worryin’s a waste of my time”.[/quote]
I am not really worried about them directly targeting the U.S. Israel seems more realistic. And I am more worried about the ensuing arms race in the ME and a powder keg with more potent powder. I thing large scale war is imminent, with nukes it becomes a much more worrisome proposition.
It’s the raised stakes that worry me. It’s frighteningly biblical.[/quote]
It’s only “frighteningly biblical” because one of the protagonists happens to have been in the Bible. If it were India and Pakistan we were talking about, a democratic, nuclear-armed country bordered by a country full of Muslims who hate it enough to illegally obtain nuclear weapons as a deterrent against possible aggression over a contested piece of land (Kashmir), we would shrug, because the thought of a bunch of Indians getting incinerated in a mushroom cloud somehow just doesn’t tug on our heartstrings as much as the thought of it being a bunch of Israelis.
And let’s be honest here. Are we really making such a fuss because we’re worried that our friends the Israelis (who by the way have enough nuclear weapons to reduce every major population centre in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia to ash) might get hurt, or could it be because a nuclear-armed Iran might be a smidge more complicated to deal with when it comes time to effect “regime change” and strategic “liberation” of the second-largest petroleum reserve in the world?
EDIT: Actually, both of the protagonists were in the Bible. The Persians, of course, being the best friends the Israelites ever had.
