Caution: Electricity can hurt you

[HeyBub]

Iranians trying to steal power:

[Me]

"HeyBub" wrote in news: [e-mail]:

While that creep was blathering at the U.N. the CIA and FBI should have told him to touch a live wire with wet hands.

[JoeSpareBedroom]

No, stupid. If you read anything except cereal boxes, you might've known that the creep is even less popular in his own country than he is here, and it's important to let him blather and hang himself in front of the whole world. When leaders show their stupidity, perhaps their people learn to vote more carefully next time around. We're in the same predicament, and you put us there.

[JoeSpareBedroom]

Did you notice how much the guy babbles? Even Iranian clergymen are gradually trying to muzzle him. He was elected with about a 1/3 majority in a runoff against another candidate who was considered far worse by Iranians. He has no real mandate.

Let him self destruct. Sadly, George Bush doesn't realize this, and in one last effort to give himself a woody, will probably order military action against Iran.

[Me]

"JoeSpareBedroom" wrote in news:6RiKi.17605$ [e-mail]:

WTF, I didn't vote for GWB or any of his regime. But somebody did something with the chads and the vote was for YOU, the Ahole on the ballot.

[JoeSpareBedroom]

Oh...and give him exactly the thing that would make him look like a victim? That would've been really stupid.

[RickH]

I wonder if these idiots had a step-down transformer so they could actually use their stolen power? Darwin's "survival of the fittest" also includes not surviving due to stupidity.

[HeyBub]

I would cause a new president to be elected!

In Iran.

[JoeSpareBedroom]

Think harder, professor.

The New York Times

March 30, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

Iran, the Vicious Victim

By MAX HASTINGS

London

TONY BLAIR has been talking tough about Iran?s seizure of 15 British sailors and marines on the Shatt al Arab, the waterway between Iran and Iraq. Mr. Blair is deeply reluctant to apologize, as Tehran is demanding, for Britain?s alleged incursion into Iranian waters. Global positioning data shows that the British naval patrol was more than a mile inside Iraqi waters. It is gall and wormwood for a leader already politically crippled by Britain?s commitment in Iraq to find himself now also engaged in a confrontation with Iran.

As international incidents go, this is unlikely to prove a very serious one. After extracting every possible propaganda advantage, the Iranians will probably free their captives. But for the British, this is a painful lesson. It is rash to expose potential hostages to one of the most reckless and erratic regimes in the world.

Plenty of people in Washington would say that violent provocation of this kind shows that diplomatic engagement with Iran, as favored by Britain and other European nations, is wasted motion; that only harsh sanctions backed up by the threat of force can influence the wild men of Tehran, headed by the Holocaust-denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Yet it is hard to punish masochists. The problem for policymakers is that Iran?s leadership positively welcomes Western threats. Almost certainly, the Castro regime in Cuba has lasted a generation longer than it would otherwise have because of the state of siege imposed by Washington. So, likewise, Mr. Ahmadinejad?s power, and that of the clerics who rule behind the scenes, depends upon sustaining confrontation.

The United States and Britain have suffered a disastrous erosion of moral authority in consequence of the Iraq war. The Blair government has been dismayed to perceive the indifference, or worse, with which its European partners have treated the seizure of its naval personnel. Britain has been obliged to water down the draft resolution that it is circulating at the United Nations Security Council, because some members rejected its original tough wording.

What should be regarded as an unanswerable case of armed aggression by a rogue state is instead being viewed by many nations as the sort of embarrassment the British should expect, given the dubious legitimacy of their presence on the Shatt al Arab.

The Iranians know all this, of course, and it fortifies their intransigence. The game they play with considerable skill is to project themselves at once as assertive Islamic crusaders, and also as victims of imperialism. They crave respect and influence. Their only claims to these things rest upon their capacity for menacing the West, whether through international terrorism, support for Palestinian extremists, or the promise of building atomic weapons.

It is often suggested that support for President Ahmadinejad is waning amid his disastrous economic stewardship. Yet whatever Iran?s internal tensions, there is little prospect that people committed to normal relations with the West will gain power any time soon.

In assessing American and allied options, there seems only one certainty. It is entirely counterproductive to respond to Iranian provocations with military threats. It is impossible for the world, and indeed for the revolutionaries in Tehran, to believe that President Bush can either launch air strikes against their nuclear operations with a likelihood of success or take ground action.

The only realistic course, even after the latest insult represented by the British sailors? seizure, is to sustain the policy of engagement, however thankless this seems. Privately most European governments, including the British, assume that around the end of the decade Iran will achieve its purpose of building nuclear weapons. Even the so-called moderates in Tehran are committed to this objective.

For all the hard words coming out of Jerusalem, it seems as difficult for Israel as for the United States to find credible military means of stopping the Iranians. A veteran British strategist, by no means a soft touch, said to me with a sigh this week, ?It looks as though we must accept that however painful are the consequences of living with a nuclear-armed Iran, this is preferable to the consequences of trying to stop such an outcome by force, and failing.?

In the eyes of many Americans, such words represent characteristic European pusillanimity, indeed appeasement. But some of us suggested when the 2003 Iraq invasion was launched that it could result in a drastic diminution of the West?s ability to address graver threats from Iran and North Korea. So it has proved.

We must keep talking to the Iranians, offering carrots even when these are contemptuously tossed into the gutter, because there is no credible alternative. Even threats of economic sanctions must be considered cautiously. Their most likely consequence would be to feed Iranian paranoia, to strengthen the hand of Tehran?s extremists. A state of declared Western encirclement could suit President Ahmadinejad very well indeed.

No sensible Westerner, committed to the pursuit of international harmony, could welcome any of this. Iran represents a menace to the security of us all, not to mention what it must be like to live under that reprehensible regime. But, in the wake of the Iraq catastrophe, never has the overwhelming military power of the United States seemed less relevant to confronting a large, relatively rich nation that enjoys considerable grassroots support in the Islamic world for its defiance of the West.

No matter how it ends, the seizure of the British sailors is likely to be viewed by most of the world as an Iranian victory. Thus it is unlikely to be Iran?s last affront to us. It is not the American way, but only patience, statesmanship and a refusal to respond in kind to outrageous behavior offer a chance of eventually persuading this dangerous nation to join a rational universe.

Max Hastings is the author, most recently, of ?Warriors: Portraits From the Battlefield.?

[mm]

I don't know the details, but either he is not in charge or he is only in charge of part of the government. There is someone else who is (also?) in charge who doesn't get as much press. Maybe it is like other countries that have a president and a prime minister. In which case he would be the president, which I think is what they call ibidibidab. (Pron. ibi-dibi-dawb)

[JoeSpareBedroom]

He's watched over by a number of clerics who are capable of reining him in from time to time, and have already done so.

More perspective on Iran, from a conservative source:

[pawlowsk002]

JSB:

My cereal box has a complete analysis of the Iranian political situation on it, and comes with a free practice ballot.

What, doesn't anybody else eat Politic-O's?

G P

[JoeSpareBedroom]

{drum crash!}

[Steve Barker LT]

That must have been the Florida version of that cereal. So they can practice voting for '08.

s

[xPosTech]

Huh! And here I was thinking it would be 'idi bidi doobi.'

mr pigs mr not etc

[Dooby2oon]

"JoeSpareBedroom" wrote in news:B_QKi.17577$ [e-mail]:

Tosser!

[mm]

I think that's his kid's name.