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Posted on 03/05/2026 5:50:52 AM PST by nuconvert
Ragin' Cajun on X: "I am not a jingoist by any stretch of the word. Moreover, my daughter is on the USS Lincoln as we speak. I have skin in this game. I have read (and heard) a lot of BS about whether or not we should be in Iran. Let me be clear...I've been a SME on Iran for 25÷ years. I speak Persian Farsi, Dari, Balochi, and Tajik. I've been to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and yes... Iran. There are few who know Iran as "intimately" as I do.
The reasons for this war are nuanced and complicated, but one thing is clear as day... the Iranian people (by and large) are good people and they just want to have the same liberty and freedom we have. Their women and girls want to be able to go out into public without having to fear if they'll be arrested and beaten (or even killed) by the "Virtue Police".
If you cannot see that, and you cannot support the liberation of a people that have been brutally oppressed for 47+ years... then you have no humanity and you and I are not the same.
-Con't on X -
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Openly intervening in the affairs of a foreign nation whilst having open borders is the mark of insanity.
If you're going to interfere with the affairs of other countries, you'd better have a border that's sealed up tight, because you're only going to invite conflict from people who might otherwise have a bone to pick with you for meddling in their domestic affairs.
But if open borders are more important, then don't start anything that'll cause foreigners to want revenge in your homeland, because they'll simply walk right in.
Dream on ...
I don’t give a damn about what happened in 1953 with respect to this time in 2026, because the takeover in 1979 didn’t have a thing (apart from an item on their Islamic propagandistic grievance list. Their goals in 1979 were tyrannically religious in nature and the gain of personal power.
The United States didn’t take over their embassy. We didn’t kill their people, and we surely didn’t destroy their society the way the ruling mullahs did in the last 47 years...and they weren’t threatening us on a daily basis from 1953 to 2026 with death and destruction.
I care deeply about a country that on a daily basis for the last 47 years has routinely threatened people in several other countries with total destruction and death.
I am not one of those people, in the nuclear age, who chuckles and says “Oh, they don’t really mean that. That is only red meat for their masses” or some other such BS like that.
I don’t know when you were born, and frankly, I don’t care. I have had my differences with you on this forum before, and NOTHING I say here should be construed as an ad hominem attack on you, even if it is clear there are more things we disagree on than there are things we agree on.
If you don’t understand the 47 year old history of threats-AND NOT THREATS...ACTUAL MURDER AND DEATH-from Iran and its proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah of DEATH TO AMERICA and you are one of those who think “Oh, it’s just rhetoric, they’re just blowing off steam” then I can’t help you.
Navy Diver Robert Stethem was MURDERED in cold blood and his body dumped on the runway in Beirut. That’s Iran.
241 Marines murdered when their barracks was bombed in Beirut. That’s Iran.
Thousands of US Servicemen maimed and in car bombings and IED devices from Iran. That’s Iran.
All of that is Iran. And that doesn’t even take into account the 150,000 people killed in the Lebanese civil war and countless others in dozens of other countries.
I could care less for any statistics about who was and wasn’t alive in 1979 and how many of those are or are not American born, I view that as a shallow and specious argument. Note that I did not say YOU were shallow and specious. I said the argument about that is shallow and specious.
If I heard someone in our government make a statement such as the one you did about who in this country should “care” about an event in 1979 as irrelevant, I would be rightly outraged.
Also, you denigrated people a large number of people ou probably weren’t alive and fighting in 1945 against Imperial Japan, but I know plenty of veterans including my father who were, and I also know many Filipinos who were, and while admire any person who can embrace the Christian precept of forgiveness, I do not. begrudge them that disinclination to refuse to buy Japanese products even if I disagree with it, and I damn sure take exception to anyone characterizing them as “old farts” as you did. I knew an Army officer who was sent to Korea when WWII ended to oversee the task of repatriating Japanese military personnel back to Japan, and when I began discussing Japan he silently got up and left the room and didn’t come back. When I asked what was wrong, I was told by his friend in the execution of his duties, that he had up close and personal exposure to what the Japanese had done in Korea and could not even be present in any discussion of Japan. And that was fifty years after the end of the war.
I never judged him for that, and would never in a thousand years issue any kind of slur like that, and most definitely not to their face. I found your comments in that respect highly offensive, and were we face to face, I would be much more severe than I am trying not to be in an online forum.
And one more thing-You may think Pearl Harbor is past history, and irrelevant. If we wake up some morning to a smoldering pit of glass where Boston or New York once stood because we allowed those beasts to obtain functioning nuclear weapons and had no qualms about giving them to their martyrs to put in a containership, people who accept the mindset that Pearl Harbor is old, irrelevant history will be every inch as culpable as the Iranian Mullah who gave the approval to give those martyrs their nuclear weapon.
And If you don’t believe a Mullah would do that, then it is you who haven’t been paying attention.
Oh, FFS. I'm always amazed at how "certain people" always rush to quote the US Constitution.... while most of the time they conveniently ignore it. America First does not equate to an isolationist Libertarian wet dream, despite how much you'd probably wish it so.
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""How exactly have our interventions in the Middle East secured domestic tranquility? How do they secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our descendants?""
By reigning in rogue terrorist nations that would kill us if they could and that have been trying to kill us for decades. (obligatory duh here)
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""It's also ironic that you would quote Proverbs 31 in support of your position, given that it is from the words of the King of Israel: were those words in reference to those who were not under the king's dominion (the Iranians, in this metaphor)? Or were they in regard to the people actually under his jurisdiction (which, in this case, would be Americans)?""
I don't know what the hell you're talking about here. I haven't posted any Proverbs 31 quote. You're obviously confused (in more ways than one).
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""For all your talk about how times have changed since the era of Washington, it's worth bearing in mind that they would look aghast in horror upon a nation that extended the voting franchise to people who don't own property; that allowed direct popular election of Senators (which completely undermines the federalistic intent of the government they established); that allowed the institution of an income tax; and so on and so forth.""
That goes without saying or having to say (keen sense of the effing obvious you're displaying there).... but it has nothing to do with the current argument.
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""Bottom line: America's own house needs to be put to order. To pretend that foreign interventions will make our own domestic disorder go away is a fool's errand, as the last 25 years has made more than apparent.""
Now I'm confused. Who and where, exactly, did I say that "foreign interventions will make our own domestic disorder go away"? They are two different issues, obviously.
And again... there's that Libertarianish, non-interventionist wet dream of never getting involved in conflict with any other nation. It's stupid, it's naive and it's totally unrealistic .... plus being a historically absurd concept re: this nation.
You literally quoted Proverbs 31:8-9 in post #11. Or did you already forget about the words you wouldn't mince?
Just fixing a Jimmy Carter Cluster F*ck from 1978 when the revolution and in 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeini entered Iran. Many people were executed shortly thereafter and not to mention the children that died clearing the minefield between Iran and Iraq.
“”You literally quoted Proverbs 31:8-9 in post #11. Or did you already forget about the words you wouldn’t mince?””
***
Lol... that was a quote by Ragin Cagin ...not my words, and yeah, I missed the Proverbs ref. Here’s the thing. I support Trump’s current initiative in Iran. You guys that don’t are on the wrong side of history here. You’ll either discover that in time, or you’ll be ok with being on that wrong side... and will keep harping on irrelevant points of disagreement. I suspect it will be the latter.
It’s very real . Very easy to see for yourself if you take a few mins to go to iranian websites or even on X
Like I have said elsewhere, only those who (like hamas) want to kill Jews say anything in support of Iran regime.
LMAO.
The youngest of them passed away almost 20 years ago.
My point is that making major decisions for the nation as a whole based on the emotions of a very narrow (and growing narrower by the day) segment of the American population is going to be politically disastrous.
Don’t say I didn’t warn anyone here.
That may well be true that a significant Iranian population is ready for change, and hoping for it isn’t a crime on the part of the rest of the world, but it is a total crapshoot on whether that will result.
Nobody knows.
Honestly, I don’t think Trump is or isn’t banking on it. Like anyone who conceal carries and is forced to protect himself, Trump is doing this action to “remove the threat”.
He is giving them an opportunity. But once the leadership is eradicated, along with their stores of munitions, drones, and factories that produce them, he isn’t going to use our troops to go that last step and provide them “with a democracy”.
He is looking for wiggle room, another 10-30 years in which the nuclear threat and aggressive action is so low that it provides time for other longer term solutions to take hold.
They may not take hold. There may simply be a brutal, internecine civil war. But they will lose the ability to project.
And from what I know, we haven’t done anything to Kharg Island, which with the facilities there, is their major point of export. That is a bargaining chip. If they refuse to change their ways, their money can be cut off by mining Kharg Island with modern mines (such as programmable ordnance, captured torpedoes, etc.) or by simply destroying it.
We aren’t doing that yet, because I suspect we don’t want to remove their sole source of revenue besides pistachios which would be sure to plunge the country into chaos and instability.
Doesn’t mean they won’t build a major pipeline into Russia and sell their oil through them, but it makes things tougher for them to rebuild.
Overall, I expect the calculus is currently that a defanged and unsuppliable military (without hard currency) in Iran with leadership in chaos is preferable to an orderly, hostile leadership bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and exporting terrorism.
I wouldn't dwell deeply on that.
People who make predictions on this forum that fail to come true seem to go dark on previous predictions, and nobody remembers who they were.
SME = Subject Matter Expert
I am only cautiously optimistic if our operations in Iran do not expand beyond their current targeted scope. (And again, that's ONLY because it's Trump who's in office; I don't think he has the stomach for prolonged conflict, PRECISELY because of how sensitive to public opinion he can be on certain matters.)
Given how things have gone in the Middle East over the past two decades, however, I would not be surprised nor shocked if things continue on as they did with Iraq and Afghanistan.
And for your talk about "the wrong side of history" (as though that's even a thing we mere humans can claim to know; who, other than God Almighty, could be described as the ultimate arbiter of what is right or wrong about historical human events?), we ended up backing Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, only to immediately turn around and stomp him down during the Gulf War, and then—little over a decade later—depose him, resulting in a power vacuum that directly led to the rise of ISIS, the deaths of hundreds of thousands from sectarian violence, the depopulation of ancient Christian communities, and the displacement of millions.
Meanwhile, after 20+ years in Afghanistan, the Taliban are back in charge like they were before our first invasion in 2001...albeit with lots of new equipment, courtesy of the United States. And all the while, our aimless interventions resulted in domestic turmoil that helped catapult the likes of Obama and his ilk into power, with all the havoc they wrought in the meantime (and who fueled the racial animosity we're still dealing with to this day).
If you can call that "the right side of history" with a straight face, then by all means, have at it.
(Also, can I just say that describing the foreign policy attitudes of the Founding Fathers as an "isolationist Libertarian wet dream" is rather ironic, given that they had many beliefs and ideas that would make modern-day Libertarians cringe?)
“”(Also, can I just say that describing the foreign policy attitudes of the Founding Fathers as an “isolationist Libertarian wet dream” is rather ironic, given that they had many beliefs and ideas that would make modern-day Libertarians cringe?)””
***
Problem is... I didn’t do that. My comment (see below) did not reference the founders’ attitude. I was talking about the current crop of naysayers who seem to want us to be non-interventionist. The founders were in a different era entirely and had no way of knowing what would become necessary throughout the centuries re: foreign policy. We can be “America First” and still get involved in other nations to protect our national security. In fact, to my mind, that is the very definition (or one) of being America First. Our security comes first, whatever it takes.
As far as that “wrong side in history”... only time will tell. I have my opinion, you have yours. We’ll see, one way or another.
“”Oh, FFS. I’m always amazed at how “certain people” always rush to quote the US Constitution.... while most of the time they conveniently ignore it. America First does not equate to an isolationist Libertarian wet dream, despite how much you’d probably wish it so.””
Do tell us what kind of U.S. national security interests have been at stake in any of the military campaigns we have had in the last 50 years.
“”Do tell us what kind of U.S. national security interests have been at stake in any of the military campaigns we have had in the last 50 years.””
***
Your little game has become tedious and I’ve run out of time and interest in playing today. Maybe later.
Besides, even if I was privy to all the intel and outlined the very obvious national security interests that you pretend to be unaware of, you would never acknowledge them as such. You can continue to pretend that nations such as Iran have posed no threat (Tucker, izzat you?) to America... but I suspect that you wouldn’t recognize the truth if it kicked you where it hurts. And some day it just might.
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