France Alarmed at Obama's Iranian Capitulation

Off Topic Politics and World Issues
21

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

I want Sifu to tell us the killing radius of the warheads carried by these missiles as well. Just to see if he has learned what the term means.
[/quote]

Considering the you’re all idiots line it started with, that is my favorite slow-motion faceplant of the current fiscal year.[/quote]

It was indeed not Sifu’s finest moment on PWI.[/quote]

Sifu’s claim is not totally unfounded:

Now of course there is a lot of conflicting information with respect to Iran’s surface to surface missile program, but the claims that they have missiles that can reach Europe are not totally unfounded. They are not totally founded either. Most indicators suggest that they have missile technology that can make the distance, but are to inaccurate to be useful militarily. And we do not know everything about their development.
What specific capabilities are nobody seems sure, but that they are a rapidly increasing threat is not in doubt by anybody save obama’s faith in the mullahs.[/quote]

Your first and third links are yellow journalism, and your second merely corroborates the data I introduced in my post. [/quote]

I suppose you didn’t understand what I meant when I said his remarks were ‘not totally unfounded’ and ‘not totally’ founded.[/quote]

Sifu made asserted that “Iran already has missiles that can reach Paris”, which I demonstrated to be a categorically invalid statement. My argument was not an argumentum ad lapidem, but based upon current open-source intelligence. Your hasty goggle search does nothing to change that. There is no evidence that Iran’s ballistic missile programs have the capabilities that Sifu definitively claims they do.[/quote]

Holy crap, your the king of missing points or being incapable of understanding them. Let me say it really slow for you so you can get it. All I was trying to demonstrate that there is information, written in black and white, that could lead one to believe that Iran did in fact have such a capability. Since the information available is conflicted, one could be led to believe that Iran did have a capability and not ignorant about the situation.
In other words Sifu, is neither a bad guy, nor stupid. He had a reason to believe at a cursory glance, what he said. And did not deserve the abuse.
You and others are so quick to jump on another person’s mistake, and then relentlessly harp on it for pages, because you apparently need the ego boost, which is apparently why you frequently give us your qualifications as well.
Maybe you’ll grow up one day and quit the 'Hey look at me, I am in college!" spiel. Most of us already graduated, we’re not impressed.

22

Only going to address a couple of these.

[quote]Sifu wrote:

The KH-55 range is 1550 miles not 1300. That extra 250 miles of range goes a long way in Europe. But that is only if they are in the mood to be nice by respecting borders and launch from inside their own airspace. [/quote]

2500 kilometers is 1300 nautical miles, which is what you use when you are talking about flight. Presumably the rocket would be flying, and not covering 1550 statute miles on a truck.

My mistake. Perhaps they can retrofit their existing 747s with solid fuel rocket engines.

I’d say that any approach of an Iranian airliner to US airspace would be looked at extremely askance. I mean, if there were any direct flights out of Teheran that could come anywhere near US airspace.

23

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

The rest was great too, but these opening maneuvers deserve special recognition.[/quote]

Inasmuch as the topic was rockets, I like to think of it as my opening salvo.

24

[quote]pat wrote:
You and others are so quick to jump on another person’s mistake[/quote]

Note that much of the jumping had to do with something else he wrote recently. Something stupid, uninformed, and – much worse, and much more embarrassingly – accompanied by a big you’re all idiots line. On top of all that, to my knowledge (and someone please correct me if I’m wrong), he just fucked off once he’d been embarrassed. No “woops, I was an imbecile” mea culpa. So.

25

[quote]Sifu wrote:
The Jews are smart people and they have been around for a long time too. But that didn’t stop the Zealot’s who were a messianic cult like the twelver’s from starting a suicidal war against the Romans.

Even the ayatollah Kohmeini thought the twelver’s were nuts. I would not trust them with nukes. [/quote]

In this we agree.

One should never trust believers of any messianic religion with apocalyptic weapons.

26

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
These are all interesting hypotheticals, but it all comes down not to “what can Iran do”, which despite all of what you’ve posted, still amounts to “not much, relatively speaking”, but rather, “what WOULD Iran do, under which circumstances?”

Despite the proclivity of US conservative media to portray the Iranians as “insane”, they are just as cold, calculating and interested in self-preservation as any civilisation that has been around in some form or another for six thousand years.

And even if they were insane, they’re not stupid. To launch an unprovoked nuclear strike against the United States or her allies would be suicide. It would mean immediate retaliation and annihilation. Whether the attacker is Iran, Syria, North Korea, Israel, France, Russia or China, the result would be the same. Immediate retaliation and annihilation.

I, for one, would give the Iranians a bit more credit than to suppose they would invite annihilation on their entire population for no good reason.[/quote]

This is correct and there is much more concrete evidence supporting these ideas than Iranians having a death wish. Fear mongering propaganda that has been going on for decades. Iran was supposed to have a nuke capable of hitting the USA in the mid-90s according to many of these fear mongers who are still shouting about the same shit today as they did in the 80s. I don’t understand why so many people enjoy living in fear.

One thing I can tell you all about Iranians is that they are extremely proud of having one of the oldest continuous civilizations, including the regime. They do not have a death wish and if you believe that you are a lemming that consumes too much sensationalist media.

30

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

…Despite the proclivity of US conservative media to portray the Iranians as “insane”, they are just as cold, calculating and interested in self-preservation as any civilisation that has been around in some form or another for six thousand years.

And even if they were insane, they’re not stupid. To launch an unprovoked nuclear strike against the United States or her allies would be suicide. It would mean immediate retaliation and annihilation. Whether the attacker is Iran, Syria, North Korea, Israel, France, Russia or China, the result would be the same. Immediate retaliation and annihilation.

I, for one, would give the Iranians a bit more credit than to suppose they would invite annihilation on their entire population for no good reason.

[/quote]

I for one don’t get all that much assurance from your assurances.

If Iran uses a proxy for a terrorist act (I can’t remember for sure but do they ever do this?) how is the deterrence that MAD is supposed to provide going to work?

I don’t think you’ve fully thought this one through, my friend.
[/quote]

I have thought it through, and I guarantee so have the Iranians.

Why has this never been done before? Throughout the entire Cold War, why did neither the Soviet Union nor the United States ever slip one of their proxies a few “backpack nukes” to expedite a quick and decisive solution to a pressing geopolitical problem?

A Mk54 SADM in the hands of whatever rebels we happened to have been supporting would have made quick work of Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Daniel Ortega or Bashar al-Assad, and the assassin would not even have to get close enough to the target to risk getting shot himself. Similarly, a few Soviet RA-115s in the hands of Marxist guerrillas would have made their revolutions go ever so much quicker.

The answer, of course, is that a nuke is unmistakable. And all one would need to do is look at the target, ask cui bono (who benefits), and extrapolate where the weapon must have come from.

If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, the world is going to know, just as the world knew the instant Pakistan and North Korea developed theirs. Just as we knew the precise instant Israel detonated their first nuclear device in 1979.

From that instant on, if any terrorist organisation ever detonates a nuclear device, whether they are a Shi’a organisation or not, the finger of the world will unambiguously point at Teheran.

Look, when a bunch of Egyptians and Saudis commandeered a pair of American jets and flew them into the Twin Towers, the finger pointed at Osama bin Laden so fast it nearly broke the sound barrier. The fact that the Taliban was letting him sleep on their couch was enough justification for us to launch a campaign of bombing, invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that is still going on nearly fifteen years later.

I don’t care who Iran’s terrorist proxies are. If any of them ever detonate an Iranian nuke, Teheran will be blamed, it will be bombed, and it will be invaded and occupied. Everyone knows this. Iran knows this. Why it hasn’t occurred to you is a mystery.

32

[quote]pushharder wrote:
I suspect because the Soviets, as evil as they were, weren’t as crazy as the bastards who’ve been caterwauling “Death to America” incessantly since 1979.
[/quote]

Huh?

Did you forget about the Comintern? And the fact that a lot of Communists really did attempt to overthrow the government during the early 20th century?

33

Yes. We’ll see.

The mullahs do harp on the anti-America rhetoric, which one would do if one were trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Something that our hawkish politicians and pundits in the United States never, ever do, of course.

And an aphorism about barking dogs comes to mind.

In the meantime, Iran, along with Jordan and Egypt, may be the only power in the region capable of controlling the spread of the Islamic State, which to my eyes appears to be the more noxious of adversaries.

We may at very least rest easy in the knowledge that if ISIS ever do acquire a nuclear weapon, it will not have come from Iran.

37

[quote]Chushin wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

Look, when a bunch of Egyptians and Saudis commandeered a pair of American jets and flew them into the Twin Towers, the finger pointed at Osama bin Laden so fast it nearly broke the sound barrier.[/quote]

Hmmm.

I could be wrong, but I seem to recall protests from around the world that it was “too soon to tell” and “there is no proof.”

Had an argument with a Brit about it, as I recall now…[/quote]

Immaterial.

The White House and the Pentagon were convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt, within hours of the incident.

It was uncanny. Almost as if they knew whodunnit even before whoeverdunnit diddit.

39

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]Chushin wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

Look, when a bunch of Egyptians and Saudis commandeered a pair of American jets and flew them into the Twin Towers, the finger pointed at Osama bin Laden so fast it nearly broke the sound barrier.[/quote]

Hmmm.

I could be wrong, but I seem to recall protests from around the world that it was “too soon to tell” and “there is no proof.”

Had an argument with a Brit about it, as I recall now…[/quote]

Immaterial.

The White House and the Pentagon were convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt, within hours of the incident.

It was uncanny. Almost as if they knew whodunnit even before whoeverdunnit diddit.[/quote]

And almost like the moon landings that never happened?[/quote]

No. We know who was responsible for the moon landings.