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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", sykesix asked the members: "What do you do if you arrive early at movie besides go to the snack bar?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Author: albaby1 ✶❂🐝 GOLD
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Number: of 88920 
Subject: Re: Iran - The Difference in Assessment
Date: 03/13/26 4:53 PM
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Iran is a cancer. Always has been. For some inexplicable reason we've been putting up with it for 40 plus years.

Two reasons:

1) First, as I'll remind you, there is a large segment of the population and the political spectrum that does not believe it is America's job to use its own blood and treasure to excise the cancers of the world. You know, the ones who opposed getting involved in foreign wars. Makes it very hard for the U.S. to commit many tens of billions of dollars in some foreign "excursion" (to borrow the President's phrase).

2) Second, not all cancers respond to surgery. Some are completely inoperable. You can't always just cut a cancer out, because it will simply grow back.

So it's pretty explicable. No one's been able to rationally articulate why going to war with Iran would improve things sufficiently to justify the massive investment in military resources that it would require.

This is not just "Oh, well, what can we do?" It's one thing to disagree with the foreign policy choices of Obama or Biden - but it's another to dismiss them as folly if you don't have a plausible suggestion for what they should have done instead.

You can't operate under the following syllogism:

We have to do something about this problem.
X is something.
Therefore we have to do X.

...because it's a logical fallacy. Just because invading Iran is a different foreign policy than that of Obama and Biden's doesn't mean it's a better foreign policy. It just means it's different.

Unless, again, you think that Obama or Biden should have invaded Iran, and you would have supported them if they had?
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This community has written 88,852 posts about US Policy. The article-length ones it recommended most:
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