Originally Posted By: IvyLeague
Originally Posted By: Lilo

Sorry but that makes no sense.
According to the best intelligence estimates, 2007, 2010 and currrent , Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. All the people calling for war seem to elide this fact. Talk about credibility. They have none. The people calling for war seem to be living in a fact free world when it comes to this. They want war. Period.

The same people who lied us into war into Iraq are trying to do so into Iran. Once again, into the breach!!

If Iran attacks the United States, the United States will destroy Iran. Everyone knows that. It's unquestioned. The question is why are some people so eager to attack a country which has not attacked us? It's like we're living in a surreal world where this quote never existed.

"War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."


I don't think we're ever going to come to an agreement on this because of the following reasons:

1. Iran not having a nuclear weapons program at this moment does not mean it isn't working on it and could have nuclear weapons capability in only a few years. It's sitting on a sea of oil and it needs nuclear energy?

2. I do not believe those people you call "war hawks" actually want war. Only a madman wants war. I believe the fundamental difference between them and you is that war is simply one of several options they're willing to consider, while you seem to have taken that off the table a long time ago (if it was ever there at all) and wouldn't consider it no matter what Iran does.

3. Yes, war is an evil thing, but sometimes it's a necessary evil. To say that it's never warranted is simplistic, pie-in-the-sky nonsense.


1) It is not a crime to have a nuclear program. And it's not worth going to war over. And going to war because you think someone might have a capacity at some time in the future to start a nuclear weapons program is an extremely bad and immoral idea. You don't kill people because of what they might do.

2) Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kristol and others most certainly did want war. Post 9-11 the first thing they were trying to do is bend the US outrage towards an attack on Iraq. They created their own intelligence office to feed the President and others what they wanted to hear. Factual. You write as if Iran is blockading US ports or murdering US scientists and I am counseling no response. I have been clear that I believe the only justification for war and any other killing is self-defense. I am not willing to countenance the deaths of between another 100,000 to one million humans just so some neo-colonialists can play tough guy with other people's lives. That is the fundamental difference between me and people of that ilk.

3) Again, I don't think I or for that matter anyone else here wrote that war is never warranted. The quote references the initiation of aggressive war as a crime, which it is. Attacking a country which has not attacked you is criminal. Iran can't even protect its scientists from being murdered or its ships from being hijacked by a bunch of ragtag Somalis and some people are speaking of Iran as if it's the Third Reich. Ridiculous.

"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives."
Winter is Coming

Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.