\nI’ve been thinking a lot about Iran lately. It’s obviously a pivot point in the coming history of the Middle East. And part of me wants to view the recent actions – Obama’s apparent toughness (I’ll say apparent because like others I’m unhappy that he didn’t use the UN as the forum for the disclosures) seems good. the fact that France, Germany and the UK are siding with us is clearly good, and the fact that Iran is willing to open the formerly-secret facility is good.<\/p>\n
But I keep getting this nagging feeling at the back of my neck. Yes, I don’t completely trust Obama internationally (more on that later). Yes, the Iranians have played us – with a pair of deuces in the hole – like masters. So there are reasons to worry.<\/p>\n
But I just can’t make the data points fall into a neat line on one side or the other of the issue.<\/p>\n
So I want to do something that I do at work when I have a decision to make with very little data – I want to box it in by asking ‘How will I know if I’m wrong?’ Proponents of both extreme positions – that we just got screwed by the Iranians and that we’ve just made a huge breakthrough with Iran – as well as the ‘we’re muddling forward and need to deal with a Nuclear but inherently nonbelligerent Iran (the Juan Cole position, as far as I can tell) need to stand up and say what facts would convince them that their position on this was wrong.<\/p>\n
Please weigh in in the comments.<\/p>\n
And because I want to make this a wide-ranging discussion, I’m going to do something I never do and openly shill for my commenters to go out and bring other people here and ask them to pile into the discussion.<\/p>\n
Because my security with any of these positions will go up dramatically if I know that there is a point short of Tel Aviv as a crater or US troops fighting in Tehran that we can use to change course.
\n–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before taking a stance on the recent news about Iran, Armed Liberal wants to know how proponents of the alternative stances will know their position is wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}