The west has picked a fight with Iran that it cannot win (Guardian)

[kpete]

The west has picked a fight with Iran that it cannot win

Washington's kneejerk belligerence ignores Tehran's influence and the need for subtle engagement

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday January 18, 2006
The Guardian


Never pick a fight you know you cannot win. Or so I was told. Pick an argument if you must, but not a fight. Nothing I have read or heard in recent weeks suggests that fighting Iran over its nuclear enrichment programme makes any sense at all. The very talk of it - macho phrases about "all options open" - suggests an international community so crazed with video game enforcement as to have lost the power of coherent thought.


Iran is a serious country, not another two-bit post-imperial rogue waiting to be slapped about the head by a white man. It is the fourth largest oil producer in the world. Its population is heading towards 80 million by 2010. Its capital, Tehran, is a mighty metropolis half as big again as London. Its culture is ancient and its political life is, to put it mildly, fluid.

more at:http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,12858,1688938,00.html

[madokie]

1. It will be a shame for us to sit by idly and allow bush*

to start bombing Tehran. He has destroyed too many cities already.

[sweetheart]

2. There can be no war

I suggest that they look at nuclear arms in an entirely new way, on a global
basis, and perhaps a new democratic administration....

Nuclear arms, for an extremely expensive price are the right of self determination,
and it is not really about nuclear arms at all, but that colonials in the middle east
are not respecting self determination of peoples. Then those colonialists are begging
for a contrary power, that opposites attract as with magnetism. And so, a colony
ringged round with a hundred nukes, is the unstated exacerbator. And when the arab
nations get nukes, when syria has them, and hezbullah has them, the balance of power
in the middle east will be distinctly more skewed. And if you think that there is a
race for an islamic nuke before the war, wait until the popular rebellion overthrows
pakistan's nutcase dictator on the back of an iran strike by the zionist colony.

Then, no matter iran, an allied islamic street with pakistani nukes. So now, given
as well, that radiation clouds of any such exchange could bring in neighboring
nations like turkey, russia and india in to things, it thankfully is militarily
impossible to use nukes cleanly in the middle of that mess. A nuclear war started
there will become global within a year and the US will lose 1/3rd of its population.

If any general or politiician recommends military force against iran, i suggest we take
every single last one of them, and teach them skydiving without parachutes over iran.
Then they can serve as suicide flesh-bombs screaming their insanity on the way down
towards bombing their enemies with thier bile.