Best Article on Iran Election Process I've seen

[kandrathe]

I meant that the consequences and violence during the protests and the repression was far less then what we are made to believe every day. The average European thinks that in Iran they daily kill thousands of enemies of the state, that everybody is at home being scared and Iran has 38 atomic bombs that are aimed at us.

Oh. I never thought they killed thousands of their own people daily, just enough well publicized ones to keep certain populations in check. If they hang some people accused of being gay every so often, it at least keeps them in the closet and afraid to tell anyone the truth. The state apparatus is a constant presence that reminds people of the tyranny which leads them, and just as in Saddam's Iraq, they learned to cope with it. And, just as in Saddam's Iraq (or other authoritarian regimes), any expression of dissatisfaction with the regime is brutally crushed a threat to any future freedom seekers.

The demonstrations show that a large part of the people in Iran are just like us. And not that (as we think) 99% of the people are potential terrorists.

70 million covert Islamic terrorists would be pretty scary. But, even 1% of the population of extremists would make a sizable army let alone a huge insurgency force.

So my whole point is: yes let's help these people to overthrow Ahmedinijad, but let's do it slowly and do not make a second Iraq of Iran. The violent method will only mean that the people will start hating the west (especially, how strange, the British) and after 5 years you have a country were the extremists are in charge.

I assume you are talking about Ireland. :) Obama will never support any attack on Iran, unless Iran did something extremely provocative that left the US no choice. I don't buy the whole "hate the west" argument. They will hate the West for many (any) reason, including our overtly decadent lifestyles, our power, our lack of power, our religion, our support of Israel, our support of regimes in Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, etc. The bottom line is that I'm resolved to the fact that they will hate us, so we should just go ahead and ignore that problem and be who we are.

Well, I don't really understand what you are trying to say here. But Saudi Arabia does fine, because they give us oil;

Not really give... But, I understand what you are saying. We are strange bedfellows due to our addiction to their drug. Oil.

do you drive a car? then you are partly responsible for abuse of women and chopping of hands. Of this is not much of a problems because they don't bother us too much (apart from giving us bin laden of course).

Do you own a diamond? Anything made of gold? Steel? Electronics? Then you are probably helping some repression of someone somewhere. I'm not very convinced the whole supply chain of shame method of convicting consumers will work very well. Maybe we should just do the old fashioned method of convicting the brutes.

Cuba? Please give them a break....without any income from trade with western countries they still managed to run the best working society in the Caribbean/Latin America.....we don't care about the people, we just don't like it the dictator is left wing instead of right wing.

:lol: I see you still have your love affair with the Castro brothers.

Anyway, point is; I think we agree on the situations in these countries, I just don't agree with an armed intervention there.

Right. I want to reserve the US military for defending the USA, and possibly our allies when we can help out.