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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

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.

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