Chris, its been awhile buddy. How have you been?
As for your points, I’ll give you my spelling and grammar are far from perfect, and on that I’ll take your advice. But I’m sorry, a number of your “corrections,” are just incorrect.
“Americans had known about the funding of the Contras for the entire time it had been happening”
That’s not true. Congress had explicitly denied funding to the Contras, and we all concluded that that was the end of that. Mr. Reagan’s team secretly organized the funding in order to contravene the law. It was a secret — which means that no, Americans did not know about it.
I may have worded this weirdly, and my memory of Iran-Contra is a little rusty at the moment, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m just wrong. However, at the very least some of the American people had to have known Reagan was funding the Contras. How do I know this? Well, in Richard Brookhiser’s book The Outside Story: How Democrats And Republicans Reelected Reagan, published the year of the Iran-Contra scandal — that being 1986, he points to many Democratic Presidential Candidates promising to defund the Contras — odd they could “defund,” something they didn’t know they were funding.
For example:
On Central America . . . [Walter] Mondale made it clear that he would stop aid to the Contras.-page 102
[Geraldine Ferraro] opposed military and economic aid to El Salvador, and supported cutting off the Contras.-page 157
A CIA operative — not a regular agent, but an “asset” on contract with the Agency — had drawn up a guide to guerrilla tactics, for use for the Nicaraguan Contras.-page 269
I don’t think Reagan would have shared his deepest secrets with Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro is all I’m saying. And I certainly don’t think Mondale and Ferraro would then not only tell these secrets, but also that they planned to stop funding to something no one knew was being funded, to a writer for National Review of all people. I don’t know, maybe it was a rejected episode of Firing Lines.
“anytime the UN looked into the issue they found Iran had no such interest[in nuclear weapons], at most, they were trying to create a nuclear power grid, which is not illegal under international law.”
That is way wrong. There is no question that Iran was pursuing the development of nuclear weapons. They were enriching uranium to levels far higher than the 3% needed for use in nuclear power stations.
The enrichment your talking about was only done to Zippe-type centrifuges, which cannot be weapons grade unless enriched for several centuries. Gernott Zippe himself even laughed at the idea this material could be weapons grade when these claims were made against Iraq, the only reason he didn’t do the same regarding Iran was because he died in 2008.
Not only that, but the typical enrichment rate for a nuclear reactor is 5%. Meanwhile, the rate for full on nuclear weapons programs is actually closer to 90%! The highest uranium has ever been enriched in Iran was by 19.8% which has done for medical reasons — at which point they also oxidized the uranium, meaning they could not enrich it further.
“… liberal hawk Hilary Clinton as Sectary of State, who also talked about invasion in 2008.”
This is technically false — she spoke of attacks, not invasion — and substantially misleading. I suggest that you examine her record more carefully. Wikipedia, as always, is an excellent starting point, with hundreds of citations to source material.
This one is purely on me. Yeah, Hillary Clinton is not really an invasion kind of person, that was just me remembering something really wrong. As such, I updated the article to “liberal hawk Hilary Clinton as Sectary of State, who also talked about attacking Iran during her 2008 Presidential Campaign,” which is way more accurate.
“Iraq had its borders drawn by Winston Churchill in the 1930s in such a way so the various religious minorities could never come together to kick the British out of the area.”
Again, you should check the facts before making statements like this. The borders of Iraq were drawn by the British government, not by Winston Churchill. They were established in 1920 as part of the rearrangements after the fall of the Ottoman regime. And the British granted independence to Iraq in 1932, so it should be apparent that they weren’t interested in maintaining control.
Did a couple of minutes of looking into this, yeah, I was just wrong. I’ll do you one better though, they were established officially in the 1930s. The border only became internationally recognized after the League Of Nations — remember them? — approved of it that year.
“ In fact, we know democracy could work in Iran — as Iran has democratic presidential elections and has had so since 1980.”
Yes, Iran has had elections. It does not have anything approaching a genuine democracy. It is more accurately described as a theocracy with some democratic trappings. Only candidates approved by the theocrats are allowed to run; the press is not free to report the truth, elections have been rigged, and political protests are met with violence.
Here, your missing my point a little. I wasn’t calling Iran some ideal Republic, I was simply saying it closer fits that model than did Iraq at the time of the invasion. Iran has candidates, albeit ones approved by the Supreme Leader (who has all the power anyway), Iraq did not even have that much.
In 2017, Iran held an election between Hassan Rouhani and Ebrahim Raisi, both were pre-approved and overall did not threat Ali Khamenei, but both had different ideas for running the country. Compared that to Iraq, who only had one candidate when they held a Presidential Election in 2002, that candidate being Saddam Hussein.
If I were to create some kind of “democracy scale” that rates the system of various countries from one to ten — one being no democracy, ten being the most free democracy possible — Iran would get a two or a three. Iraq pre-invasion would barley be worth giving a one. In fact, giving it a one makes me want to bump up Iran’s rating to a three or a four by comparison.
