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drnick1yesterday at 10:15 PM5 repliesview on HN

You can't have a bunch of deranged mullahs threaten the entire region and world with missiles or nukes. Chanting "death to America" for half a century and killing thousands of Americans directly or indirectly. America should have blasted the hell out of the mullahs when they took hostages about 50 years ago. This is the first administration in a long time with the cohones to do something about it.


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carefree-bobyesterday at 10:20 PM

This is not exactly a nuanced view of the conflict, and in either case, the fact that you don't like that someone on the other side of the world is chanting death to America doesn't give you a bonus card for a free attack.

Seriously, it's like people, when deciding whether to launch a war or not, are not thinking "how will the other side react and will this conflict benefit me" but instead they are only thinking "does this nation deserve to get hit".

Well, news flash, your moral outrage does not translate into you not suffering more than your opponent during a conflict. It's a completely separate issue, and a personal issue between you and your priest or rabbi. When it comes to starting wars, you have to look at military capabilities and long term outcomes, not "does this nation deserve to be attacked".

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mitxelayesterday at 11:45 PM

> You can't have a bunch of deranged mullahs threaten the entire region and world with missiles or nukes.

Can and do. It's called the United States of America.

darkarmaniyesterday at 11:21 PM

> This is the first administration in a long time with the cohones to do something about it.

Containment worked WAY WAY better than "doing something about it" and surrendering the strait to them. They "solved it" by aerosolizing asbestos everywhere and still have no cleanup plan. Sometimes containment works much better, which is why intelligent foreign policy worked the problem from that angle.

Wasn't victory declared 1 year ago and also a number of months ago?

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clownstrikelolyesterday at 11:04 PM

You mean the same people who were told to keep the hostages until after Reagan got elected?

The same people who bought weapons sold by the Reagan administration to fund the Sandistas?

That’s some revisionist history you’ve got there.

StanislavPetrovyesterday at 11:26 PM

Do you know why Iranians were chanting "Death To America"? Because we toppled their democratically elected government in 1953 and installed a brutal dictator so that we could continue to pillage their oil.(1) When the mullahs finally toppled that dictator in 1979 they had reason to be angry with us. This is especially true because almost immediately afterwards, in the 1980s, we used our proxy Saddam Hussein to launch a war against Iran, in which over a million Iranians were killed. During this time we provided Hussein with the means to make both chemical weapons and biological weapons (2), which Iraq used extensively against Iran. I suspect if another country did the same to us, we'd be chanting "Death to XYZ" too.

(1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

(2)https://irp.fas.org/congress/2002_cr/s092002.html

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