All I’m trying to communicate is the conversations that I’ve had with my Iranian wife, her expat friends, and my in-laws in Tehran.
Or maybe they should just focus on being Americans in America and some day Iran will sort itself out without the US' "help".
A non-theocratic Iran is in the US interest.
If you give the Iranians arms, I’m sure they would be happy to fight. Have we armed anti-regime Iranians?
I do think we have an obligation to help. That’s just my personal opinion.
As an analogy: if your neighbor is beating his wife, it’s not moral to just put your earplugs in and go back to sleep. You have to take action.
We should prioritize. We have to be pragmatic and choose our battles. We can’t be everywhere at once.
Iran has destabilized the region for decades. It’s hard to imagine how game changing it would be to remove that.
> we have to be pragmatic and choose our battles
this sounds very far removed from “we have a moral obligation”
bottom line, we should not give two shits about what is happening there and we even went voting for a candidate who told us he’ll be the one to make sure we don’t give two shits about it except of course he turned out to be worse than all previous ones combined :)
This is not comprehensive and maybe you can quibble with some of it, but it is not mysterious why we might care.
Entirely rational, given their desire for sovereignty and avoiding getting bombed to oblivion.
> Iran has stated it would like to destroy the US and Israel.
The linguistic nuance of the slogan "Death to America" has been articulated and clarified over a decade ago.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/irans-ayatollah-ali-khame...
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/what-does-death-america-r...
>Israel is an outpost of Western democracy and our ally.
The former is a meaningless characteristic when said democracy commits a genocide and runs an apartheid state (hard to deny with the recent capital punishment law exclusively for Palestinian prisoners). Hardly model behavior for anyone else in the region to emulate. The latter is meaningless since this ally only ever drags us into problems, almost all of which are of its own making.
> Cooperation between Israel and its neighbors would be a great asset to the world economy.
It's easier to cooperate with your neighbors when you stop squatting on their territory, or stop massacring them.
>but it is not mysterious why we might care.
I think "people who care" should volunteer to serve in the IDF, and leave the rest of America out of it. Kinda like the various low-friction pipelines for people to go fight/die for Ukraine without committing US Service Members to such a wasteful endeavor.
lmmaaaaaooo
you mean like when we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan? So many great examples of successful intervention to refer to!
you mean like Libya, right? or North Korea? should we fix them again too?
how... how do you hold this position without reading even just 20 years of history?
But having an opinion doesn't make it a good opinion and there is no way to say "please get my grandmother's blood on your hands for my insane vision of Iran" sanely.