Will 2012 be an incredibly cynical election?

[horatio83]

If you seriously think that there is nothing wrong with a presidency under which executive killings have been legalized, Gitmo has not been closed and drone attacks have wreaked havoc in West Pakistan I cannot help you.

1) You've listed these things about 200 times now. We get it.

2) The question is: What's the alternative? Do you think Romney would be any better? I doubt it.

3) Your condescending tone isn't doing your cause any favours.

4) Noam Chomsky called and asked me to tell you not to just call him a "libertarian" because that makes it look like he's in the same category as that libertard Ron Paul. Chomsky is a leftist libertarian. Call it libertarian socialism if you want but not just "libertarian". Libertarianism means too many different things at the moment.

Calling me condescending while writing such a post is more than just irony.

I am so sick of middle-class liberals who do not actually care about all the issues which the contemporary left fails to address and then wonder why the right-wing has become so powerful. Politics is not a binary 'vote X or Y' game.

 

[horatio83]

I share my carefree attitude about Iran with most of Europe.

Indeed. The logic of MAD still works and if countries like India, Israel and Pakistan may have nuclear weapons I fail to see why Iran may not have them as well. It's not like they do not have ample reason to be paranoid after the '53 coup. The Iranian financing of Hamas and not the bomb is the larger problem concerning Israel's security.
Labelling them religious nuts ignores that the current regime behaves pretty rationally and wants to stay in power like everybody else does. I am the first one to criticize Hezbollah, Hamas and the actions of the Shiite warlords in Iraq ... but it seems strange to me that we bash the Iranians while ignoring that our friends in Saudi-Arabia and Pakistan are the ones who basically create Sunni extremists aka Al-Qaeda.

People forget that Ahmadinejad never said that he wants to wipe Israel off the map, that Khamenei has once written a fatwa against nuclear weapons and last but not least that the saber-rattling of Israel merely helps the current regime to deflect from interior problems. Focusing on exterior politics to deflect from interior problems is the oldest game in town so in a strange way Ahmadinejad and Netanjahu both profit from this game they are playing.
So if one wants to support the Green movement and hope for a second, more successful revolution talking about war is the wrong thing to do.

 

[cooleddie74]

The logic of MAD still works and if countries like India, Israel and Pakistan may have nuclear weapons I fail to see why Iran may not have them as well. It's not like they do not have ample reason to be paranoid after the '53 coup.

Yeah, that's a marvelous idea. Stand by and do nothing or even encourage the fundamentalist regime of a major world oil power to get thermonuclear weapons. It's bad enough the other nations you mentioned have them and those places make me nervous as hell sometimes, but for yet another country to cross the threshold into nuclear armaments production in an era when the nuclear superpowers have drastically slashed their own arsenals and continue to do so is just plain irresponsible and counterproductive to the cause of world peace. And I don't think that Iran has "ample reason" to be paranoid because of a CIA coup that happened almost sixty years ago. That coup was a stupid and pigheaded Cold War mistake on our part, but the mullahs and their puppet Ahmedinejad can't harp on Mossadegh and the Shah forever and use that as a convenient excuse to arm themselves to the teeth with the world's deadliest weapons. No terror-supporting state ruled by religious reactionaries and fundamentalists should have the bomb. Period. I don't care if someone says it's not my or anyone else's right or business to say so. Tough crap. They shouldn't have nukes, and that's that. If Iran wants to play the victim and whine that the big bad West is bullying them they can drop dead. This world has spent the past 25 years trying to get rid of as many nuclear weapons as it can and the last thing we need is a dysfunctional, belligerent state like Iran getting its grubby paws on more of them.

 

[horatio83]

I am not a friend of the Iranian REGIME, they are as you pointed out fundamentalists and a destabilizing factor in the region. What I disagree on is that they are lunatics who would actually use the bomb. The Soviets and the Americans never used nuclear weapons precisely because they are a defensive and not an aggressive weapon. Without this deterrent power the place where I am living, central Europe, might have been the battleground of WWIII.
Same with Pakistan (besides Saudi-Arabia the hotbed of Sunni extremism and the place where the US fights right now against them; Afghanistan is basically just a backyard) and India or Israel and Iran. The logic of mutually assured destruction still works.
If Netanjahu may have the bomb I fail to see why Ahmadinejad many not have it (ignoring for the moment that Khamenei would actually wield the power) as well. They are both populists with some fundamentalist background but their game is all about the money.
It's like with George W. Bush, easy for any Arab media outlet to portray him as a crusader with Blackwater and so on but in the end the Iraq war was not a crusade (OK, it was definitely a a bit off a "we are a dieing empire but don't fuck with us" message) but a scam to rip off the American public and let corporations like Halliburton profit enormously.

No terror-supporting state ruled by religious reactionaries and fundamentalists should have the bomb.

Please note that I don't wanna bash anybody, certainly not the US or Israel which are lovely countries, but as I wrote above it is easy to claim that Bush and Netanjahu were respectively are associated with religious fundamentalism. Yet they have behaved respectively do behave rationally and do not cause a nuclear holocaust.


So yeah, without being a friend of the influence that Iran has in the region, particular in Lebanon via the Hezbollah, in Palestine via the Hamas and now in Iraq (which has a Shiite majority so I am happy that they are no longer oppressed by Saddam but the little Kissinger in me wonders why we got rid off Saddam whom we installed after all in the first place as a bulwark against the mullahs) I wholeheartedly say that if the Iranians develop the bomb we have nothing to worry about.

 

[cooleddie74]

I hope you would be right. I seriously do. The last thing I want to see in my lifetime is any conflict involving the detonation of one or more nuclear weapons, especially in the Middle East of all places. But given the oft-unstable and violent nature of international as well as internal politics in that part of the world I just honestly don't know if I can sleep well knowing that Iran has a nuclear arsenal. Were Iran a democracy in the heart of Europe or the Americas? Yes, I'd be fine with that...I'd still detest the weapons, but I wouldn't be looking over my shoulder every day for a breaking newsflash that something horrible has just happened in that part of the world and a new war has just started.

Let's hope you're correct. But given the Middle East's track record since 1948? I'm not going to hold my breath.

 

[horatio83]

I agree.

Nuclear weapons are a tricky thing. On the one hand they have kept the Cold War cool but on the other hand they are potentially our annihilation. If everybody behaves rationally and plays by the book nothing will happen ... but what if a statesman does actually wanna see the world burn or what if there are some technical or chain of command issues?

So yeah game theory and the logic of MAD is fine and dandy but Murphy's law is perhaps more important.