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Comment by KorematsuFred | Hacker News Reader

Is this very different from Americans though ? Americans have forced all nations to treat Iran as a terrorist state when it is very friendly to rest of the world compared to Saudi. Saudi Barbaria exists only because of Americans.

Can we say with certainty that American money isn't coming to other countries with strings attached ?

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I'm not sure friendly is a word I would use to describe Iran, and Saudi Arabia would exist with or without American support. The US-Saudi alliance is rocky at best, and only exists because the Saudis have oil, and largely persists because Saudi hates Iran, which is important to the US because of their strong alliance to Israel. You have to choose sides in the Middle East, and the US chose Israel. Everything else flows from there.

The US is an enabler of Saudi nonsense, but the Saudi state is not being propped up with American resources. They would be powerful in the region regardless of American support.

> Saudi Arabia would exist with or without American support

At the same level? I have my doubts. If they weren't a close ally of the US, terrorist financing/leading stings would be going much further. Would they be able to do their thing in Yemen without US support? Or would they be a pariah on the world stage because of their acts, which are hard to tell apart from those of ISIS/ISIL? Not that I'm a big fan of the Iranian Mullahs and their backwards idea of how to run a society, but they appear somewhat moderate compared to the wahabi style.

Things would be significantly different in hard to predict ways. I'm just saying that "Saudi Arabia wouldn't exist without America" is extremely wrong.

Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are dystopian oppressive tyrannies. I don't think any western nations should be "friendly" to such countries that so openly and proudly trample on basic human rights.

China's also a dystopian oppressive oligarchy. Should we be doing business with them? I think we shouldn't, but given how deeply their hooks are into our economy, there's not much choice at this point.

Iran funds Hezbollah, thus unless we want to claim Hezbollah is not a terrorist group, then it follows that Iran is a terrorist state, even if through a Hezbollah proxy.

So is the US a terrorist state because it funded the mujahideen and terror linked groups even until recently in Syria?

The US was funding terrorists fighting terrorists, so that's back to being ethical again. /sarcasm-but-not-ahistorical

Honestly, yes.

The United States meets its own definition of a rogue state.

Friendly? With all the bomb and assassination plots? Not friendly to Europe.

https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1137831840188948485

It was a Lebanese group. In that sense America is linked to every tyrant in Middle East, ISIS etc. America has always been the agressor in Iran relationship.

The entire news article appears like typical american hitjob. There is no evidence whatsoever that Iranian state is linked to this man, heck no evidence about Hezbullah either.

At any rate none of this is different from what Saudi citizens have been doing for years in Europe and USA.

Even extremist Shia Iranians, from what I have read and heard, view Wahhabi Sunnis as radical.

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