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Comment by ourmandave | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile the headlines say Trump is sending more warships to the area and telling Iran it's running out of time to make a deal or else.

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But what deal exactly?

I can not help but feel that a lot of what Trump is doing in general, is for the show purpose effect.

    But his precise objectives remain unclear. Speaking at the premiere of the documentary Melania, the US president told reporters Iran had to do “two things” to avoid military action. “Number one, no nuclear. And number two, stop killing protesters,” saying that “they are killing them by the thousands”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/30/donald-trump...

There is no deal. The problem with Iran is that it's a regional power that is not aligned with Israel, so Israel has been insisting for decades that it must be attacked. The desired outcome of course is not to "free" Iran but to weaken it so that it can't be a rival power. So first it claimed it was because of Iran's nuclear program, and when Obama put that under control with an agreement that gave Iran the opportunity to thrive, it pushed Trump to renege the deal so Iran's nuclear could be a problem again and the sanctions restored.

It's a power whose slogan is "Death to the US" and which has been doggedly working on nuclear weapons for decades. Try and temper the Israel Derangement Syndrome sufficiently to see that the US and the Mideast would be better off without the Iranian theocracy.

It's not their slogan and it doesn't mean "death"- that's just a purposeful literal mistranslation. "Death to" in Farsi translates as "down with" in English, and that's the actual official translation. And they have all reasons to be angry with the US.

Ah, and one thing I think the world would be definitely better without, is a western apartheid state with genocidal tendencies placed in the middle east and hell-bent on conquering land and destroying all opponents, armed to the teeth and supported by the west beyond all reason.

It's inexplicable how you can spout this nonsense. Somehow it makes sense to you that there is a relevant distinction to whether a regime machine-gunning its own citizens is shouting "Death to (insert unrelated country)" or "Down with (insert unrelated country)".

You can say that the US is "unrelated" to Iran only if you have zero knowledge of history, either out of ignorance or, most probably, out of convenience.

So they're killing protesters because they hate the US and Israel? QED, I guess.

It's a regional power that funds militias and paramilitaries in half the middle east, which uses those paramilitary organizations to exert control and influence over their neighbors and occasionally to assassinate political opposition (e.g. in Lebanon, Iraq), and to prop up the likes of Assad (Hezbollah got involved in the civil war on the Assad side, and in one instance laid siege to and starved out a village) and threaten Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Israel is part of the equation but Middle Eastern politics is more complex than that.

In national politics, one calls for the vote when the outcome has been decided, in order to "put a bow" on matters.

Trump can be expected to pull a trigger when the results are similarly "known" (Maduro), and not a moment before.

The Iranian situation is orders of magnitude more complex than Venezuela, and the stakes are obviously higher on both ends. If the Iranian autocrats persevere, they will argue heaven is on their side. If Trump fumbles, the Loyal Opposition will be a proxy for the Ayatollah at the midterm elections this November.

For one who (according to his detractors) is an idiot with no self-control, Trump shows much strategic patience.

Like last time, so far he’s bad mostly for his own country.

The Medrano abduction and kirking Iran’s leadership may end up positive actions from a humanitarian view.

> Like last time, so far he’s bad mostly for his own country.

How well is that going?

> The Medrano abduction and kirking Iran’s leadership may end up positive actions from a humanitarian view.

Meduro may no longer be in Venezuela, but his entire regime is left intact in place with a puppet leader under the remote control of the so-called 'acting president of Venezuela'. So the local dictator of an authoritarian regime is replaced by a foreign one - a very racist one at that. How is this positive on 'humanitarian grounds'?

In Iran too, Trump's callous rhetoric has riled up the Iranian regime to crack down heavily on the protestors in the name of treason. In the future too, his behavior will only bring more suffering to ordinary Iranians.

Why is it that when it comes to authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, so many people pivot to judgments based on nation and race, instead of being politically consistent?

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