Comment by JohnTHaller

7 hours ago

Iran probably wouldn't have blown up the $300m radar installation if we hadn't randomly attacked them.

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  • History really doesn’t say otherwise. Tensions were mostly cooling after the Obama nuclear deal.

    Now the message we’ve told the world is: If you don’t want to eventually be at risk of the US attacking you, you better be nuclear armed.

  • History does not say otherwise. The US however has a history of attacking Iran, including murdering 190 people on a civilian flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

    • Not sure why this comment is downvoted: the facts are established, as is (among others) the Mosaddegh coup d'état co-organized by the US:

      > On 19 August 1953, Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d'état that strengthened the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. It was instigated by the United Kingdom (MI6), under the name Operation Boot[5][6][7][8] and the United States (CIA), under the name TP-AJAX Project[9] or Operation Ajax. A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mosaddegh nationalized the country's oil industry. (...) > In August 2013, the U.S. government formally acknowledged the U.S. (...) was in charge of both the planning and the execution

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

      Or the US backing of Saddam Hussein from 1982 onwards during the Iraq-Iran 8-year war of aggression, with “massive loans, political influence, and intelligence on Iranian deployments gathered by American spy satellites”. During this war, Iraq employed chemical weapons leading to 50.000 - 100.000 Irani deaths.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War

      This (and other pieces of historical context) help very much understand the Iranian insistence on a ballistic missile program.

  • History doesn't say anything, because there is no precedence Iran attacking the US assets first.

  • Iran has never carried out an attack against US military infrastructure that wasn't clearly retaliatory.

    Look it up. Every case of Iran attacking US infrastructure has been in direct retaliation to the US blowing up some Iranian stuff.

    Sure Iran has funded tons of proxy attacks by anonymous militias but these are generally not at the same kind of scale.

Is there good evidence for this?

  • Yes. Their repeated warnings that Iran would no longer tolerate the kind of back-and-forth blame shifting that think-tank policy papers openly described years ago as a strategy to keep Iran off sides, and that any attack by Israel would be considered an attack by the USA too and that American assets that surrounded Iran would be attacked; since under all the clownish “who? Meeee?”act gaslighting and stupid pathological lies, everyone knows they are one and the same.

    It’s like dealing with psychopathic toddlers who think people aren’t smart enough to know they are lying when they deny killing the family pet even though their hands are covered in blood and you just watched them mid act of slaughtering the family pet.

  • It'd been there for decades. And Iran stated that if attacked by the US and Israel they'd retaliate against US targets in addition to Israel.