Who hasn't in the middle east? including Israel and the US (that is not even a middle eastern country).
Israel - Iran and regional players | Please post respectfully and stay on topic
- Thread starter Raoul
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Who hasn't in the middle east? including Israel and the US (that is not even a middle eastern country).
Honestly and with the greatest respect. What a load of fecking bollocks. Seriously. I couldn't give a shit about either of those reasons you said are the only two anyone wants. I want Iran to have one to add fairness in the middle east and to stop Israel being a fecking bully to the entire region. I want everyone to talk and agree or at least agree to disagree but on a fair playing field. All the time Israel are the only country with Nukes and being backed by numerous others with them, that's never going to happen.
I will reply after I've been shafted by my mate who played snooker for years with the sadly deceased Paul Hunter. Actually, I need a nuke to win a frame today.
You can go back to Mosadeq or the Shah or the Cold War, but the situation today doesn't absolve the Islamic Republic of its post 1979 behavior, which has by the way continued well after Khomeini's death. The fact of the matter is we have a Velayat-e Faqih cult in charge of a country whose own citizens don't support it, and that is fomenting chaos across the region as a device to advance its own power. Until that goes away, the region will continue to be unstable. Even if you remove the US from the equation, the Iranians have still gotten into it with the Saudis, and with their activities in all the other countries previously listed leave them as the common denominator among the regional actors.
Very goodYeah how dare they get invaded by Saddam - backed by both the US and USSR! - right after founding.
Israel is cleansing Gaza after the Saudis and Gulf states bombed starved Yemen. Both happened with active US military help, not to mention arms supply/sales and diplomatic support. Before that you have ISIS, the Syrian civil war - both where you can say the US had a peripheral role - and then the Iraq war itself, where the person you're responding to was an active participant. I'm not even counting every instance of Israel trimming the grass in Gaza every few years through all this.
It's amazing how un-self-aware (at best) Americans are about their role there.
Nonsense. The region was an unstable quagmire prior to the Khoemenites, and will continue to be one after them. So long as the US and its partners continue its hegemonic meddling which will only continue to spawn factions, if not entirely new regimes with the same heinous ideological makeup.
And again what of the Israelis? You keep pointing to these scary cultist Iranian theocrats but seem perfectly content with your own team's sponsored cultist-religious genocidal maniacs reaping havoc. No one is going to take US fear-mongering about Iran or the Russians seriously while you continue to cradle, protect and enable a mass-murdering society of ethno-fascists hellbent on achieving some homogenised, colonial vision of cleansing the territory for themselves.
No one said the region wasn't historically unstable. The fundamental fact remains that the post 1979 religious autocracy that have governed the country since the revolution are dedicated to exporting their ideology across the region by covert force, which is why they have armed so many proxy groups from Iraq to Yemen to Lebanon to Syria to Gaza, to do their bidding for them. The existence of Israel as a nation state is obviously an impediment they are hellbent on removing.
Who said anything about the US?
Iran has been trying to destabilise the region for years with the aim of ensuring nobody can threaten them. Big part of why they hate Israel so much and why they're now taking a pop at Saudi.
Every time there was any progress towards peace in the Iraq or Afghan wars, we'd find Iranian operatives in the cities working with local militia trying to destabilise things.
Do you see my point? You're completely tunnel visioned on Iran's theocratic doctrine in the region while seemingly apathetic towards your own ally's equally heinous ambitions. You can't claim to be seriously concerned about one group of cultist theocrats who since the Iraq-Iran war have been more bark than bite, while openly backing and supporting another who are actively acting on their nefarious colonialist genocidal ambitions. Its textbook hypocrisy.
You're not wrong with your final point, Iran's modus is sabotage, but to call them the primary destabilising force in the region is a little absurd don't you think?
And you cannot simply omit the US from the conversation if you're talking about the players who have had the most devastating footprint in the region. The Iranian regime wouldn't have come to be had it not been for the US' caustic stranglehold over the region. Its just bizarre to point fingers at Iran being the primary culprits for instability in the region while seemingly remaining oblivious to the historical prime destabilising faction.
I don't think the two issues need to be conflated. By regional standards, Iran is far away from Israel and has no geopolitical need to get involved. Khomeini and Khamenei were simply interested in Israel because of Jerusalem (hence the Quds Force) to liberate what they deem as Muslim land. Its simply using religion to expand their power footprint.
The world's greatest evil terrorist organizations are all somehow ran by Bartleby the Scrivener.
They absolutely do if you want your concerns about Iran to be taken seriously. Its convenient deflection to simply dismiss the Israeli issue as an irrelevant peripheral one when they're very actually doing the very things that Iran are constantly accused of doing by neocon hawks. Pretty much every accusation and concern your hurling towards Iran is currently being acted out by your Israeli partners, in the name of cultist dogma too no less. The only difference is they aren't wearing black turbans and have at least half your politicians on their payroll.
incompetent morons at hezbollah proving why the third world is the third world and why the white world has been ruling for 500 years.
I mean there's a bit of a power discrepancy when one faction is being backed by the US and the other by some paper tiger theocracy. The Chinese don't seem to have the same issues with their intelligence exploits.
we've been taking 100:1 or worse casualties since then. of course the west will treat us like dirt, unless we ever rise to the white's level.
Any poor soul - man, woman or child who happens to be in proximity to the phone shop or someone with the pager becomes fair collateral then as part of this 'targeted' operation?
Sounds like textbook terrorism to me, though with Israel it appears those lines are blurred, if they even exist at all. The Israelis might as well have just skipped the covert nature of it and resorted to their favoured 'targeted' missile strikes in Southern Lebanon and Beirut. Just label any bit of civilian infrastructure whether its a hospital, school or falafel stand as a Hezbollah hideout and be done with it. Seems to work for them anyway.
@Kaos
This is how the first big British victory in India happened:
Did the millions who died in the famines after this deserve it? No, same with the random people getting their faces blown up in Lebanon.
But it's just sheer incompetence. No excuses. Deserve to lose.
This is how the first big British victory in India happened:
Did the millions who died in the famines after this deserve it? No, same with the random people getting their faces blown up in Lebanon.
But it's just sheer incompetence. No excuses. Deserve to lose.
Did Iran kick off the instability? No. Are they the biggest factor in its continuation? I do believe without Iran's influence a good number of the MEA conflicts would have been finished a lot sooner and with less bloodshed.
There is a lot of poking the bear going on in the region and then crying foul when the bear rips your head off. Most of it backed by them.
A small explosion that only injures the person holding it, when the person is somebody in Hezbollah or somehow connected to them, is about as precise as you're going to get in warfare.
I mean I take your point, but I think we ought to be holding western democratic societies to some sort of standard when it comes to collateral civilian casualties. The Israelis' callous approach can hardly be classified as morally better than the modus operandi of terror cells like AQ and ISIS. Not that I consider Israel a genuine, bonafide democratic society but its Western allies seem to insist it is.
There would not need to be peace in the afghan and iraq war if those had not been started by the US. The latest with false accusations in front of the international community. But yeah Iran is to blame
Out of interest which conflicts do you think would have been quicker resolved had the Iranians not been involved in some capacity? The Iraq war? The US deemed it a good idea to dissolve Iraq's entire political and security infrastructure, and radicalise swathes of radical Sunni factions who were the prime perpetrators of the terror attacks that plagued the country for over a decade. And like it or not, the Iranian-backed militias played a pivotal role in driving ISIS out of the country when the Iraqi armed forces had retreated with their tails tucked in between their legs. The Shia factions had exclusively targeted US troops who lets face it - were considered unwelcome and hated invaders and occupiers and were considered fair game by the majority of Iraqis.
Syria? I mean the Assad regime largely had the Russians to thank for consolidating his grip on power, and let's not forget the US and its allies opting to back unsavoury opposition factions (many of whom were linked to Al-Qaeda), thereby playing a role in prolonging the war and suffering.
Afghanistan? That war was doomed from the start, with or without Iranian involvement. No one has successfully invaded and occupied that nation. Heck the Iranians actually played a role in helping overthrow the Taliban which some conveniently forget.
Yemen? I take it we should have just let the Saudis continue their campaign of bombing and starving millions of Yemenis uninterrupted.
As for your final point, those pager explosions didn't just target Hezbollah members. There's plenty of verified stories out there of civilians, young children among them caught in these attacks.
I'm under no illusions about Iran's destabilising role in countries like Iraq, and I for one can't wait for them to indefinitely feck off from that country. But singling them out as the prime culprits for the instability, while ignoring the role the US and its allies have played which has been magnitudes more worse and devastating, just strikes me as a little disingeuine.
Iran isn't unique in trying to destabilise. Mossad - ignoring the current events - have been doing the same for longer. The CIA/MI6 all have operatives doing all sorts of shit everywhere, it'd be mad to assume otherwise.
Iran is working with their local militia, the US and allies tried to make terms with theirs, e.g. the Kurds in Syria. In Aghanistan it just so happened that the guys the Americans tried to train and mould into an Afghan army were mainly corrupt mercenaries addicted to opium and got overrun by the Taliban.
In Iraq, Iran backed the Shiites - because, guess what, that very country invaded them and conducted one of the bloodiest wars of the 20th Century for eight years in the 80s (with Iraq fully funded by the US, UK, France and even Israel).
Destabilisation in the middle east didn't start and won't end with Iran.
Israel is just performing terrorism at this point. Nothing particularly new there, but the method feels somehow even more indiscriminate.
This is definitely not worse than bombing a hospital to be fair. It sounds like a meticulously planned op where they directly sold equipment to Hezbollah. I'm not sure if it's even possible to determine whether innocent people are near their targets or not.
I’m no Mossad fan but this surely is one of their most successful operations in many years, maybe since Stuxnet. Hezbollah absolutely humiliated there
I mean we can debate whether its more morally palatable then air-striking a hospital, but the fact they couldn't guarantee that an explosion would only harm their intended targets hardly paints them in a glorified light. Its in essence not too different from a terror cell setting off an explosion from a politician or police chief's car, knowing full well there could be dozens of innocents caught in the crossfire.
What?
It definitely isn't when you're detonating five thousand of them at once.
the western world has been superior to the non-western world for 500 years, and a lot of it is down to non-western incompetence.
'Targeted' operation. Unless of course emergency responders are considered fair game, which going by recent precedence - they evidently are.
This was a terror operation, you can dress it up as some form of impressive intelligence feat all you want, but the fact is they set off thousands of explosions at the same time, not knowing who will be caught in the crossfire, and where they'd be. If this responder happened to be picking up their kid from a crowded daycare, I dread to imagine the carnage that would have ensued there.
I've said it before, because its Israel, the rules of engagement are entirely different. Had the Iranians pulled off the same operation in Tel Aviv or somewhere in the US or Europe, it would be condemned as a heinous terrorist attack, and the repercussions with would severe for them.
I think that's kinda the point. Israel continue to outdo themselves. This is the military equivalent of trolling.
I have a controversial take on this;
The Western World became superior the moment they took religious dogma out of its governance and geopolitical aims and the "Third world" has yet to do the same.
It took quite possibly the most brutal war in history relative to its time for the Western countries to realize this however.
In terms of success, its definitely right up there with Stuxnet. Beyond the humiliation factor to Hezbollah and Iran, it also suggests Mossad human sources have deeply penetrated Hezbollah such that they can get information about the pagers and hand helds they are ordering, then intercept the orders at the supply chain level to emplace small explosives in each of them.
Ah, the Battle of Plassey. Although it must be said luck played a huge part in the success of European colonialism. And that luck was swiftly obscured by a myth of white supremacy.