Can we ALL agree that a "Cuban Missile Crisis" scenario with Iran could NEVER be justified?

In the end, isn't keeping the planet alive more important than "winning" in a confrontation like that?

Especially since we can assume that ever government Iran's ever going to have will pretty much be like this one?

Clearly, President Obama is sane enough never to want to do anything JFK did internationally, but there are people in high places in D.C. who still haven't given up on making "Dr. Strangelove" a documentary.

Do you mean if Iran moves nuclear weapons to a place close to the US (such as Cuba), we should just let them?

to threatening to blow up the planet. Quite simply, nothing could ever be worth that again.

And Iran would never move missiles to Cuba, if for no other reason that Cuba doesn't actually need them.

Also, I hope we could agree that it would be insane and suicidal for Israel to attack Iran, since that would have to lead to a massive Iranian counterattack and a regional war ten times worse than the U.S.-Iraq conflict.

On the one hand, you say that there has to be some way of preventing that. One possible way to prevent that is to have a military strike against Iran to remove the missile facilities before missiles are created. But then you say (and your point has merit) it would be insane for Israel to unilaterally do just that.

So for those two points not to be contradictory, you need to point out another way of preventing a cuban-missile-crisis like situation, without taking immediate and unilateral military action against Iran to prevent the construction of the missiles.

The truth is, any of a number of countries could immediately start a cuban-missile-crisis-like-situation if they wished to. That is simply the nature of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. Most nations will never do this, because it is not in their rational self interest to do so.

Iran is included: it would certainly not be in Iran's rational self interest to provoke a nuclear crisis with the United States. The question then becomes, are the leaders of Iran actually rational. If they are rational, they would most likely not start such a crisis. A rational Iran might use their nuclear technology as leverage to get a good deal from the US, in exchange from stopping Iran's nuclear program.

But what happens if the leaders of Iran are simply not rational? What option (other than a pre-emptive military strike) would prevent a cuban-missile-crisis situation from occuring?

Any attack by Israel would have to lead to massive civilian casualties. As Operation Cast Lead shows, the Israelis are no longer capable or interested in "surgical" military operations, and any attack on their part could have no other possible effect but to either:

a)permanently rally the Iranian people behind the hardliners;

or

b)produce a different Iranian government that would HAVE to be worse, since Iraq shows that western military intervention can only produce worse governments in Middle Eastern countries.

The insistence of the U.S. on re-instating the Shah in 1953 also bears this out.

The answer is to lower the tension. Why is this so hard to understand?

If they are rational, and engage in diplomacy with good faith, they might halt their nuclear program in response to a US offer.

But if they are not rational, and their end goal is to develop a nuclear weapon, lowering tensions would not stop them at all.

Your non-military way of preventing a cuban missile crisis seems to assume that Iran is rational, whose goal is not to produce a nuclear weapon for its own sake. What would be your way to stop a crisis if this assumption were not correct?

In that case, the sane and prudent strategy is to let things ease off and wait for a different leadership to naturally emerge on its own within Iran. Iran can give itself a better government, but nothing anyone does through force from the outside can do can give them anything but a scarier and more belligerent one.

We know that we can't make Iran behave better by letting Netanyahu vaporize the whole damn place, which is what Bibi wants. Then, when Iran naturally responds to what Bibi's done with massive military retaliation, Bibi would demand that the U.S. intervene. Then, we'd all be doomed to mass slaughter.

I just feel that if this were 1938, we could be having a similar debate, where you would say that we can't make Germany behave better by letting the British (or the US) "vaporize the whole damn place" to prevent a world war (and that we should therefore allow Germany to continue its military activities).

I think most of the opposition to military strikes here involve the assumption that Iran is at least somewhat rational, that Bush was overreaching and unnecessarily alienating them, and that with proper diplomacy we can figure out how to stop a crisis from occuring. This may very well be the case.

However, I highly doubt that most people's opposition to a military strike on Iran is because we assume Iran is not rational, that Iran would launch nukes at us if they could, and that we therefore need to tiptoe around Iran to delay this eventuality.

Iran has never wanted to take over the world. And the Jewish community in Iran really doesn't have it all that bad(as compared to the Jewish community in the U.S.-allied nation of "Saudi" Arabia. You know, the one that doesn't exist anymore?)

And that's a wicked cheap shot to compare me to a 1930's appeaser. Neville Chamberlain was a Tory and a right-wing hardliner. People on the left have nothing in common with upper class pro-Nazi Brits.

And Munich was a meaningless sideshow. The Second World War had already been made a certainty by the arrogant treatment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, a treaty that destablized Germany's newly formed democratic government and unfairly punished it for a war that was solely the responsibility of the Kaiser and the German military(as well as the rulers and armies of Britain and France, of course, who were equally to blame).

And the last chance of preventing the war had already been lost when "democratic" Britain and France sabotaged the anti-fascist side in Spain. Once Franco had prevailed, all hope of preventing World War II was already hopelessly lost.

Also, by 1938, everyone knew that any war with Germany would have to be a full-scale world war, so the "fight a small war to prevent a large one" option didn't exist. There was never, ever a possibility of a limited war with Germany.


It goes without saying that there can never be anything again that could possibly be worth the loss of life experienced in World War II.

You said:

"If the current Iranian leadership isn't rational, that's even more reason NOT to provoke them."

In my opinion, that attitude is similar to the attitude of Western governments at the time of Munich. Sure, Iran has not shown any interest in taking over the world, and there are of course other major differences.

But the idea that the more irrational and hostile a country is, the less we should attempt to intervene, is an idea that I fundamentally disagree with (as a general proposition -- there might be exceptions, such as an insignificant country with no power to hurt the rest of the world). While Iran is much less dangerous than Nazi Germany in certain ways, the possibility of an irrational state having world-annihilating nuclear weapons could make the situation more dangerous. If we know that Iran is irrational, wants nuclear weapons, has the potential to construct them without our intervention, and wants to threaten us with them (with realistic threats) or possibly use them, than I think it would be absolutely insane to sit back and do nothing just to avoid "provoking" them.

But of course those conditions are not all necessarily true today, which is why most do not support a military strike against Iran. So if you are talking about just what we know now, I agree with you. But if you still agree that we should step back EVEN MORE under the assumptions that they are irrational, want nukes, can make nukes, and might threaten us with them, just so we avoid provoking them, then I disagree with you.

JFK overruled his military commanders (who wanted an immediate first strike) in favor of diplomacy, and the resulting deal with the USSR (to remove our missiles in Turkey in exchange for the USSR removing its missiles in Cuba) resolved the crisis without any military strikes.

Before he did. And, in the end, the U.S. ended up accepting the Soviet terms they'd pushed us to the verge of Armageddon to not take in the first place.

The missiles were in Cuba. Do you think that JFK should have just allowed them to remain? JFK (or any president) would probably have been impeached had he took such a course of action.

And the Cuban government would never have ASKED to have those missiles sent in if JFK hadn't acted like he was going to take another crack at an invasion as soon as possible after the Bay of Pigs. We should never have done that invasion, and after it failed(as JFK had to have known it would)the U.S. should have immediately promised never to intervene in Cuba again.

Nothing good could possibly have come of ending the Cuban Revolution anyway. All that that could have led to was another permanent right-wing dictatorship. Nobody on the Cuban exile right wanted Cuba to actually be a democracy anyway, at least nobody involved in the Brigade. All the brigadistas were right-wing extremists.

and in fact agreed to a pledge saying that the United States would not invade Cuba, I would think you would agree with JFK on that point.

As for your first point, JFK did not threaten to attack the USSR mainland if the missiles weren't removed. He instituted a naval blockade to prevent additional equipment and missiles from arriving in Cuba. He would not have ordered an attack on the USSR mainland unless the USSR committed a similar act of aggression.

If what you are saying is that JFK should have taken attacking the USSR off the table entirely (regardless of what the USSR did, even if they attacked the US with missiles), then again, any US president who did that would probably have been impeached.

Khrushchev initiated the Cuban Missile Crisis because he wanted to extract concessions from Kennedy and demonstrate his resolve to his allies as well as his hard-liners. Yes the Bay of Pigs was really dumb and it made Castro eager to accept Khrushchev's missiles, but even without the Bay of Pigs he probably still would've felt threatened by the United States and ready to accept Soviet protection.

but I am very grateful to the 69 million Americans that ensured any such situation will be handled by Barack Obama and not John McCain.

Iran most definitely is a Country whose enmity was fostered by Bush. They had been providing the UK with intelligence information about Al Queda, until the axis of evil speech. Effectively all contact on that was broken on the War with Iraq. For them a nuclear Iran is a logical step. Iraq was part of the axis of evil, accused of having WMDs, which everyone knew was a lie, and invaded. North Korea was also part of that axis, they however had WMDs. They were not invaded and Bush offered "talks".

But we have to do what we can to keep anybody from pushing for it.

Nothing is ever going to be worth threatening to destroy the whole planet again.
(A threat that was pointless, in the end, because JFK ended up agreeing to the original Soviet proposal, which was to remove their missiles from Cuba in exchange for OUR missiles being removed from Turkey and our agreement that we'd never again try to invade Cuba.)

has now, is absurd. Why on earth would anyone make such an assumption. Iran is a really young country, demographically speaking, and that big chunk of citizenry is different in many ways from the older segment.

militarily could ever have the effect of giving Iran a better government. The problem is, our government has inadvertently discredited the idea of democracy in the Middle East by turning it into a euphemism for seeing your country put under western dominance and capitalist austerity.

Years ago, Phil Ochs captured the phenomenon well in his song "Cops of The World"

"We own half the world, o say can you see,
And the name for our profits is 'democracy'
So, like it or not, you will have to be 'free'..."

first strike, that would justify military action. I have not been convinced of that presently.

than the alternative. Go back and study the history of the Cuban Missle Crisis. Better yet, read RFK's memoirs and recollections on the crisis. The book is titled "Thirteen Days". It was possibly one of the finest moments in diplomacy in the history of the US. The other option was invasion of Cuba, which would have lead us to WWIII with the Soviet Union.

I also thank the Higher Power that JFK was president during this crisis!! Imagine if Bush had been President during the crisis!!

there would be corporate media reports of Cuba's alleged "nuclear weapons program" in the news every day.

are more than capable of taking care of themselves. We should stay out of it; unfortunately we're not very good at that.