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Posted on 02/14/2006 8:18:24 AM PST by humint
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What’s the most effective way of dealing with the threat posed by Iran’s radical leaders?
Ends at 2006/3/3 19:55
Initiate more dialogue 7 % (8)
Launch surgical military strikes 32 % (34)
Impose Security Council sanctions 8 % (9)
Support Iranian dissidents as agents of change 51 % (55)
Total Votes: 106
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Iran Focus is a pro-MEK (Mojaheddin) site that is trying to get the US government to remove the terrorist label off the MEK, so the venue is skewed.
How about getting rid of the Iranian regieme?
Where is the answer: Support those willing to fight for their country to rid them of the Mullahs?
Support for those willing to fight the Mullahs sounds great and makes a good slogan BUT where will you find them inside Iran? Other than as "brave talk".
All action is immediately and ruthlessly snuffed out without any need to cater to laws, justice or even humanity.
A quarter of a century of being physically beaten with clubs and tire irons in the streets, arrested without evidence and tortured - also raped (by men) regardless of your sex while in custody - having friends and family also arrested regardless of their participation then having to watch your females raped to teach you a lesson and being lashed as further punishment often just before being executed, leaves little spirit for further resistance.
From the students' or opposition point of view, neither you nor your friends have any military training with which to face the mercenary (mostly Arab) Bassiji, you have no weapons nor a source to get any and MOST DISCOURAGING you have no leader or figurehead to follow who might be able to face up to the Mullahs (in the past) and to the IRGC (Islamic Guards) of the new nutcase president Ahmadi-Nejad (currently).
Despite all this and having to spend VERY long hours to find enough food to live on, you are being asked to overthrow the monster that rules every waking moment of yours? That has permeated your psyche for 25-years with fear? Or for the uneducated masses with theological superstitions and fears or ignorant devotion.
The only support that might work is to remove the threat of the regime by eradicating it and allow those currently inadequately provisioned, trained and without any protection of the law, to come forth without fear for life and limb.
THEN support them. THEN help them build a democracy on the ashes of the burned to the ground Mullahs. No more Alice in Wonderland idealism and rhetorical philosophy of peaceful change in the face of the monsters that hold sway right now over every human inside the country. Even foreign diplomats cannot count on their own safety.
Good grief! Could YOU stand up to the clerics after all this? Are you sure? Would you come futiley into the streets in what has been shown and proved time and again in the last decade as virtually suicidal? You would? Then get on a flight and go and help them out on the streets of Iran. Not throw platitudes and impossible suggestions because neither you nor they have a way to make it happen - except in hopes and dreams.
If you would NOT have the courage to do so yourself under the above circumstances, stop asking or expecting them to do it and throw their lives and well being away to satisfy YOUR mindset or Western protocols that have no hold in Iran while the Mullahs are there.
Two Iran clocks are ticking; the international and the domestic. It is common knowledge, or at least it should be, that Iranians are struggling for a better life, be it within the confines of the Islamic Republic or outside it. They deserve a better life than what the Islamic Republic is offering and the Free World deserves peaceful partners, not fascist dictators who threaten global security.
This poll is interesting in that it encourages rational debate about potential solutions to the Iran problem. At this stage, it looks like air strikes have the lead and supporting opposition is not far behind. Confidence in dialogue and sanctions appears relatively low. Is this poll scientific? Not at all, however the constraints of internet polling are, at a minimum, suggestive and could lead to more stringent statistical analysis.
That said, what does this poll have to do with the courage you mention in your commentary? Iranians have some hard decisions to make in the near term. Americans do too. In a world fraught with terror and nuclear proliferation, courage is the order of the day. Without courage, Tehran would be making nukes today without oversight. It goes without saying that both Official American and Iranian Dissident COURAGE has made great strides in preventing the Islamic Republic from fulfilling its ambition of regional domination. These are realities that are wholly separated from any individual’s mindset.
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6 % (4) 
32 % (21) 
7 % (5) 
53 % (35)