Iran Nuclear Deal

Dude! WTF! Am I no longer in the running?

I don’t think anyone has said or even implied this is a good thing…

What would you have done?

This type of unwarranted personal attack says more about the attacker than those being attacked.

lol… Case in point.
Is being insulted by bismark a badge of honor? lol… Awesome.

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Kept the money frozen and unfreeze it if it accompanied a thaw in relations between our two countries? Is that a possibility?

What’s your take on the Iranian Nuke agreement?

It’s pretty warranted, given both of you have a propensity to enter these discussions without a rudimentary understanding of the theoretical underpinnings, historical context, and 101 facts of the issue at hand and go on to move the goal posts and cry “elitist!” when those who can actually be bothered to study the above call bullshit. When outright bullshit is called out and beat over the head with an intellectual club, you fail to acknowledge it. Look no further than above for a grievous example of that.

P.S., I take no issue with disagreements, in fact, I welcome it. Said disagreements, however, must be based on a solid theoretical and historical understanding. Anything less is argument by gut impulse, which falls far short of the import of the extremely complex issues at hand.

That’s the diplomatic equivalent of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Diplomacy is inherently underpinned by quid pro quo - even the coercive variety that resulted in the JCPOA.

Then you think it was a great treaty. The Iranians give up their nuke program, yet can become the top conventional, terrorist funding power of the Middle East.

Now, what could we give them so that they will stop funding terrorists? How can we stop them from buying conventional arms from Russia and China?

Or don’t you agree this also is a problem. A non-nuclear armed Hezbollah, Iran’s ally, defeated Israel.

You yourself said their ballistic anti-ship weapons could destroy our fleet. What would you say if we were driven one day from the straits by a non-nuclear, Russian backed Iran? Not such a good treaty then?

I think it’s a paper tiger that’ll blow up in a future administrations face (be it Clinton, Trump, or the next set of bimbos).

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No. We were discussing the ‘bounty’ paid to Iran to release our hostages from the rogue state.

Then immediately you turned coin and just started calling me names and a ‘no good, know nothing’, for no reason. Just out of the blue, you pull statements from very old conversations to try to denigrate me and completely change the topic. Your little red herring trick did not work, I did not go jump into the past to try to explain to you what I meant by something I said a long time ago.

That’s childish behaviour, a tactic rather than an attempt at conversing on a subject.

I was meaning you no ill will, we were discussing a point on which we did not agree. Instead you go attack me personally, I suppose because you had nothing else to say on the topic at hand and wanted the appearance of a victory for all you adoring T-Nation fans. All you actually did was troll me with a $20 mouth. But hey, whatever you need to do to boost your fragile ego…

That would be Saudi Arabia. To which the US sold over 1B of weapons recently.

Don’t get me wrong, Iran funds, equips and ultimately uses Hezbollah as cannon fodder in Syria, but shia terror acts are usually confined to killing sunnis.

So if you live in the West, fear sunni terror, not shia terror. No lone wolf shia attacks in the west.

The shia religious structure is formalized with a clear hierarchy - similar to pre-schism Christian churches. Therefore, everything is decided on the very top, whether it’s bombing sunnis in Lebanon or launching an antisemitic tirade in the media. No ISIS franchise system.

Consequently, it’s more akin to the USSR than extremist islam as the religious talk drives the specific geopolitical goals of Iran. Therefore, the can be treated as a regular country, albeit run by a totalitarian repressive regime.

Salafi sunni islam has this apocalyptic death cult fixation that cannot be explained in normal policy terms.

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I’m glad you post here @loppar. Your posts are very insightful.

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VERY insightful.

Thanks, @loppar.

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Agree with everybody on your insight. Great info…

And you can bet, with the current disdain for Israel in Washington and the quagmire that is Syria, and Russia now launching it’s operations against ISIS and other opposition groups from Iran, we are going to double down on Saudi Arabia. We’re going to arm them to the teeth, to our own detriment.

Russia completely kicked our ass and totally wrestled control of matters from the middle east from our hands. While we stood around wondering what to do, Russia jumped. Totally called our bluff and made a huge power play in the Middle East.

Maybe that’s a good thing, to let them deal with the zoo. But we’re going to end up making the Saudi’s a super power in the region. A country we have no business supporting.

My take on it is this Pat, and I’m interested in what loppar and others have to say about it: In the 00’s the US took out Saddam, who, ultimately, was a Soviet client. Recently we took down Qaddafi, another ex-Soviet ie Russian client. So when we made a move against Assad, the Russians, wanting to save face and keep their naval base, made the move you talked about. They had enough of their clients being ousted and finally took a stand.

Same could be said about Ukraine. The Soviets moved out of Eastern Europe. NATO expanded in that area, right up to Russia’s doorstep. Finally Russia or Putin had enough and the war in Ukraine is another Russian face saving stand.

In regards to their growing influence in the Middle East. We were perceived as weak and they pounced on the opportunity. They are doing to us what we have been doing to them since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Right or wrong? What do you think?

I’m going to address this paragraph by paragraph.

I could easily imagine a better deal. However, I understand that students of world politics must be able to differentiate between what is and what ought to be. In the world we have, the deal is quite good. Coercive diplomacy is superior to containment of a nuclear Iran, which is is superior to a preventative air campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities. The JCPOA is not a treaty. See my legal reasoning ad nauseum above.

Properly understood, the JCPOA is an arms control agreement. It doesn’t (not should have) address Iran’s regional behavior. Regime evolution (as opposed to regime change) is the key to ending Iranian sponsorship of terrorist proxies. In the meantime, full spectrum containment is the best response (which is much easier with a non-nuclear Iran). In regard to Iran importing arms, Iran has a robust military industrial complex of its own. It exports military equipment to 57 countries.

See above.

Where did I write that? American Naval hegemony in the Persian Gulf is not going to be turned on its head by Iran’s attempt at an anti-access/area denial weapon system (A2/AD), and Russia is certainly not going to precipitate a great power war by supporting Iran in such a foolhardy action. You misunderstand the relationship between the two states. Again, not a treaty, and I find it ludicrous that anyone who clearly hasn’t studied the agreement has such a strong opinion of it.

Me thinks, and this is conjecture, I don’t have all the facts and could not have all the facts unless I worked for those arms of the government privy to them, that it is similar to the soviet expansion in the 20th century with one important difference, they are not interested in conquest. I mean this with respect to the ME. The Ukraine is a territorial dispute. The Russians believe it belongs to them and resent it’s solidarity. With the annexing of Crimea, I think the domino effect will eventually follow.
Without having put up a strong resistance backed by the military in the very beginning stages, there was no chance for Ukraine. The Soviets invested a lot into the Ukraine, they want it back… Somewhat understandably if you are seeing it from the Russian perspective. No I don’t support it, but I think it’s too late to do anything about it without major escalation. For Russia, they have nuclear weapons there (I think, I don’t remember any move to remove them during the fall and even if they did, it’s not something they would have telegraphed to the public.). So presuming the Ukraine still has some of Russia’s nukes and their are not a friendly state, that alone is motivation to get it back. Plus Ukraine has oil. It was a major target for the Nazi’s during WW2 to take out the ukrainian oil fields, a target they never managed to hit effectively.
As for face saving, yes partially but Ukraine is important to Russia and it’s west friendly moves and it’s desire to join the EU was too much for Russia to take, especially considering their nukes are there and our nukes are close to there…

With the ME, they aren’t interested in conquest, they want alliances and allegiances. As far as strategic positioning, their is no better geographically positioned state in the ME than Syria. It borders Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and the Mediterranean. They are friendly with Iran and if they manage to restore Syria to Assad, Putin owns Assad. He can treat it like his own country. It tips the scale of power in their favor if they get Syria on their feet again.

So if Russia has Iran and a stable Syria on their side, the power in the region shifts heavily towards them. Iran gets bolstered as a major power player as sanctions are lifted, 1.7 billion they shouldn’t get ever is infused into their economy and they are a nuclear state. Once Iran gets what they want and they have strong ties with Russia and Syria, it won’t matter much to them if our sanctions ‘snap back’ or don’t. The only thing preventing them, at that point, from obtaining nuclear weapons is Russia.

Needless to say what effect this will have on regional tensions or the wider tensions between Shia and Sunni. With Russia as a power player in the region, the Shia side will be greatly empowered and the Sunni’s will feel threatened. The Shia/ Sunni tension is already rising. Why do you think the regional powers to the west aren’t too bent out of shape because of ISIS? Because ISIS is Sunni and so is Saudi Arabia. If they were Shia, you can bet the Saudi’s would be way more interested in their destruction.

Here’s a good article about Russia’s interest in Syria…

You know what is weird? In that article, right where the map shows Russian airstrikes picking up, then east into the region of northern Iraq, that whole area would be a great hub for a land based transcontinental shipping lane. I was just scoping it out on the googlemaps, and you can draw a straight line directly across to Chinas industrial base, and due north straight through Turkey, Iran, Azerbijan and Georgia into Moscow.

If I wanted to do something like a transcontinental pipeline/railroad/trucking rout, I would definitely consider that a possibility, rather than that Siberian bullshit they have to deal with now.

Or mybe not. I’m just looking at it like a game of “Risk”.

Nope. Saddam was not a Soviet client. The Soviets didn’t have real clients outside of the Warsaw pact (they couldn’t even control communist Afghanistan before the invasion) and certainly didn’t exert any influence on him. Did you forget the infamous Rumsfeld - Saddam handshake?

The USSR was still (barely) in existence during the Gulf war and they didn’t lift a finger.

Don’t let the Soviet military hardware fool you - many dictatorships in the ME played a double game imitating the non-aligned movement, trying to beg/blackmail/extort both the West and the East into giving them money. The US could provide generous financial assistance in the form of hard cash, something the USSR couldn’t do. They could however offer tanks. Hence all that Soviet equipment from Iraq, Syria to Yemen and Ethiopia. Add the “socialism” phrase somewhere and you’d get a bonus.

In the 80ies during the Iraq-Iran war Saddam was the “enemy of my enemy” for the US and therefore a “friend”. It is speculated that one of the reasons Saddam took that colossal gamble with invading Kuwait is that he believed he was seen in a positive light by Bush Sr. and his advisors and that they will let it slide.

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