re: #84 A Cranky One

Clue: It’s NOT just the US in talks with Iran. How can sanctions work if Iran reaches a deal with the other countries and they remove their sanctions?

You don’t have the first clue what the agreement being worked entails, yet are certain the deal, being worked by NOT just the US, but by P5+1, can’t possibly result in a non-nuclear armed Iran.

The P5+1 is a group of six world powers[1] which in 2006 joined the diplomatic efforts with Iran with regard to its nuclear program.[2] The term refers to the P5 or five permanent members of the UN Security Council, namely United Kingdom, United States, Russia, China, and France, plus Germany. P5+1 is often referred to as the E3+3 (or E3/EU+3) by European countries.[3] Wikipedia

Without their help, how do you plan to accomplish anything but a war?

Are you proud of both your ignorance and your arrogance?

Is it arrogance to doubt that the proposed arrangement will work? Or is it arrogance to be so sure it will?

The broad outlines of the proposed deal are emerging. None of us is entirely ignorant.

You seem to think that Russia is opposed to Iran’s becoming a nuclear power. Why?

And then there’s North Korea. Which right now is already a nuclear power, after decades of the US saying that that would be unacceptable. What does “unacceptable” mean, then? That we are not delighted by the result. It doesn’t even mean that we will not prop up their economy.

I expect that Iran will have a nuclear arsenal within 15 years. Why can they not replicate the steps North Korea took? Your side will get its way, and who knows where it will lead? I hope, and more than half expect, that Iran will be cautious. But I don’t know that it will. Look how they talk, after all. And Saudi Arabia will probably follow suit, as will Egypt, (Saudi Arabia won’t have to invent anything; they can buy stuff) and the Middle East isn’t known for being so much different from the Balkans when it comes to being a breeding ground of wars.

You say I want war. I don’t. Nobody does, really. [OK, except for Putin, who is even now waging one in Ukraine, one he started, and for ISIS, and for Boko Haram, and if we reach back into history, Saddam, and the Argentine colonels, and who-all. That’s the snag. Trotsky was right on one point.]

But the rest of us don’t want war. People get killed, and in much bigger numbers sometimes than what our own recent wars have come to. So that’s a good reason to want to avoid war. But say you assume, wrongly, that all I care about is business. Well, war is bad for business. It brings inflation, and higher taxes, and shortages, and it strips skilled manpower out of the workforce and wastes years of their time on the war, and some of them come back disabled or in caskets, which is again bad for business because they were our best, on the whole, and skilled labor is critical to the economy.

If I’m wrong and this all blows over peacefully, I’ll have to say that Obama will have earned the Nobel Peace Prize that was voted him without his having yet achieved anything much for peace at the time of the award.