Yes. There are far too many people who claimed that Obama wasn't a "true progressive" on Twitter and that was pretty infuriating.

As for the killing of Soleimani...he definitely deserved it and I really don't mind that he's dead. I'm worried for the inevitable shit storm that will likely follow after this. I'm not convinced that Trump fully understands the consequences of such a move. This is a major escalation and I'm in "wait and see" mode for the next 2 years!

by wasted opportunity i meant since he got them to the table and they did strike a deal, presumably a better deal was possible. that's really all i meant. maybe in reality im wrong and Obama literally got every last bit of concession from the Iranians that was humanly possible. that's just very rare generally in any form of negotiation. very rarely is the true ceiling/floor hit. it seems like the rest of the disagreement rests on "decent", so we can drop it rather than wade into semantics.

as to nuclear power vs weapons. there's a battle of competing narratives. "Iran is XX months from having a nuclear weapon" (pre deal) and "Iran is 100% stopped any and all weapons development and is fully cooperative." In a post Iraq war world I don't take number literally from intel communities, fool me once. But I do still take the threat of Nuclear weapons and dirty bombs somewhat seriously, especially in the hands of a state which sponsors terror. And on the other hand i'm sure most development was stopped. but i dont take the treaty signing to be the end all of the situation. Iran carrys out attacks across the globe via funding people to take credit on their behalf. what stops them from developing a shitty soviet era clone dirty bomb to set off in Europe or America? likelihood? not sure, probably low. but again i err on the side of caution with nukes in play.

as to specifics on how i'd want more assurance weapons development is done? not sure, i'd have to research that and formulate a more solid plan with specifics.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Jan 3 2020 02:01pm

I think there's four scenarios you can weigh
"appeasement" vs "bully" vs "schizophrenic landing on appeasement" vs "schizophrenic landing on bully"
We're in the 4th scenario. The first two scenarios are no longer options. We started with 'appeasement' and then went with 'bully'. That's clearly worse than going with 'bully' from the start.

But part of our amazing hindsight powers here is that we can reasonably say Obama should have known his Iran Deal playing nice would never work out. The fact was, he knew at the time Hillary opposed it and would look for excuses to undermine it, and he knew she'd be the DNC-picked candidate for 2016, and he knew all the republicans opposed it. What scenario was there, where we stuck with 'appeasement'? I mean, that's a more general criticism of all of Obama's policymaking that crumbled as build on quicksand, but in the Iran Deal's case it was particularly damning as we went from isolating them to giving them $1.7 billion and trillions in oil market access back to isolating them again in the span of 3 years.

Now, the left / neoliberals insist that appeasement, even schizophrenic appeasement, is better than bully or schizophrenic bully. The right and neocons and Trump insist the inverse, that schizophrenic bully is better than appeasement.
Will we ever have the capacity, even with the benefit of hindsight and history books decades from now, to know what truly is the better call?

But I think there's a logical argument that "schizophrenic appeasement" is the worst scenario of all because it both empowers Iran and gives it no reason to abide by any terms, both putting it on track to a nuke and giving it reason to keep leveraging its geopolitical influence. At least with both bully scenarios, there's a reasonable strategy to keep Iran away from the nuke entirely by making it so expensive and slow to achieve and their economy in such shambles that their efforts grind to a halt.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Jan 3 2020 02:03pm

i agree to many things. but it brings me back to the "Iran will have a nuke in XX months" narrative. which would have suggested they were closer to a nuke than we wanted. and thus it may not be prohibitively expensive, even behind sanctions.

The only ones involved here are U.S & Iran, but i know your guys would enjoy to spread war in EU like you are enjoying when your army kills a million of civilians in Iraq.
Experts are agree that the asshole-in-chief elected by a bunch of superior human beings did a serious mistake: it's never a good idea to play assassination game against a whole country.

I wish you the worse.

I was post memes of Martin Luther King saying "i have a dream" and Obama saying "I have a bomb".

Half of these trumptards are new here and to politics.

As for the strike I feel similar to when Obama assassinated that Al Qaeda propagandist and his son unilaterally without congress. Except this seems riskier.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jan 3 2020 02:06pm

Troops deployed.


Way to bring them home.

https://mobile.twitter.com/rosemcgowan/status/1213101280278790150

guess this individual will not be moving next door to the ayatollah as she previously alluded to

the question is: what do you base that on, in order to come to your conclusion the deal wasn't even decent? what we know, from both the expectations prior to the negotiations as well as its reception after being signed, is that it was celebrated by the international community and foreign policy experts as a diplomatic masterpiece, and that iran's concessions were so extensive that they drew severe criticism, even death threats, from iranian hardliners. the people that are criticising it from the other side are mostly israeli and american hawks, who would rather see a military conflict than a reasonable diplomatic solution - that's why i was surprised to see you share that take, and wondered where you were coming from. my guess that it's simply an easy sacrifice to make in order to appear 'centrist' is really the most charitable interpretation i could come up with given the context.

so if your argument, that a deal isn't even decent if someone doesn't get "literally every last bit of concession humanly possible" (which obama actually might have achieved in this case, at the very least he was damn close), is just an exercise so you won't have to admit you're wrong on this, all i can say is that it's petty and entirely unnecessary - at the end of the day, you can always call it a matter of opinion, which makes it technically impossible to be wrong on this. all i'm saying is that you haven't provided any reasonably convincing arguments to back that up - at least from my perspective. at the end of the day, facts should be more important than ego - especially considering what trump's confrontational diplomacy with iran has lead us towards.

concerning the second part, the iaea is not the "intel community", and the signing of the treaty just started their regular controls and diligent supervision of iran, so let's please not act like this was purely based on trust and empty words.
imo, there is no deal that can 100% prevent a dirty bomb from being set off - what it can do, however, is put a de facto hold to a country's nuclear arms program (which it did), incentivise cooperation and de-escalation (which it did) and thus lead to a normalisation of relations that would significantly decrease the likelihood of state sponsored dirty bombs being set off in random cities (which it would have). and again, keep in mind that we're talking about realistically achievable outcomes that require all parties to cooperate, not wishful thinking, where NO country (including america) has (dirty) bombs or commits atrocities of any kind (including drone strikes killing millions of innocent civilians, invading countries under false pretenses, indiscriminately murdering foreign citizens...).

but hey, maybe the smart people and experts involved in crafting the iran deal simply overlooked the dirty bomb scenario, and forgot to include a provision that would have completely eliminated that possibility - in that case i would totally agree that the deal was objectively bad... because guess what - i wouldn't want that to happen, not in europe, not in america, not in asia, or anywhere else for that matter...

This post was edited by fender on Jan 3 2020 03:40pm