Chris Matthews surprising honesty on US-Iran relations

[Copernicus]

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Certain people should be prevented from buying guns (such as the criminally insane, or violent criminals), and there are some regimes that should be prevented from obtaining nuclear weapons. It should be even more imperative to prevent a crazy or evil regime from obtaining nukes if that regime is also an avowed enemy of yours who calls repeatedly for your death (as in "Death To America!") I think Iran's regime falls into such a category that should be prevented from obtaining nuclear weapons.

edit: and the fact that Iran may think the same about us happens to be non-germane as to what should or should not be done. Thank God it is we who have the nukes and Iran doesn't, rather than the other way around. Can you imagine what Iran might already have done if the imbalance of power were reversed? Iran denies the holocaust and chants "Death To America! and "Death To Israel!" even now.[/b]

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Again, who gets to decide which side is good and which is evil? If they see us as an evil force, why are they not allowed to take the same actions? I honestly don't think it matters which country is right or wrong in this instance. It is very easy to picture a myriad of scenarios where we think we are virtuous when we are actually being quite evil. I don't think it is a good system to just claim that the good guys can do what they want and the evil ones can't.

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If you don't think that it is demonstrable which side is acting more morally then either you don't have much confidence in your moral values or you accept moral equivalency. I don't. If you don't believe that the various positions JK laid out earlier in the thread are morally superior then you are right, neither side has any right to express its views through war.

I think the moral equivalency contingent is in a distinct minority however. Oppression of women and gays IS wrong, execution or banishment of a woman who is raped IS wrong, attempting to impose your will on others through blowing up restaurants and school busses IS worse than declared war, army vs army, intentionally placing strategic targets in civilian areas in a time of war IS wrong. Once you eschew moral equivalency (if you are able to), things become much less gray.

[Taraz]

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Certain people should be prevented from buying guns (such as the criminally insane, or violent criminals), and there are some regimes that should be prevented from obtaining nuclear weapons. It should be even more imperative to prevent a crazy or evil regime from obtaining nukes if that regime is also an avowed enemy of yours who calls repeatedly for your death (as in "Death To America!") I think Iran's regime falls into such a category that should be prevented from obtaining nuclear weapons.

edit: and the fact that Iran may think the same about us happens to be non-germane as to what should or should not be done. Thank God it is we who have the nukes and Iran doesn't, rather than the other way around. Can you imagine what Iran might already have done if the imbalance of power were reversed? Iran denies the holocaust and chants "Death To America! and "Death To Israel!" even now.[/b]

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Again, who gets to decide which side is good and which is evil? If they see us as an evil force, why are they not allowed to take the same actions? I honestly don't think it matters which country is right or wrong in this instance. It is very easy to picture a myriad of scenarios where we think we are virtuous when we are actually being quite evil. I don't think it is a good system to just claim that the good guys can do what they want and the evil ones can't.

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If you don't think that it is demonstrable which side is acting more morally then either you don't have much confidence in your moral values or you accept moral equivalency. I don't. If you don't believe that the various positions JK laid out earlier in the thread are morally superior then you are right, neither side has any right to express its views through war.

I think the moral equivalency contingent is in a distinct minority however. Oppression of women and gays IS wrong, execution or banishment of a woman who is raped IS wrong, attempting to impose your will on others through blowing up restaurants and school busses IS worse than declared war, army vs army, intentionally placing strategic targets in civilian areas in a time of war IS wrong. Once you eschew moral equivalency (if you are able to), things become much less gray.

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Even if I agree with you in all these examples it doesn't prove anything. I'm talking about the tactics employed by either side, not the ideology driving them. You can't claim that you can take certain actions simply because your intentions are pure and good. Who gets to set this standard? What if there is a disagreement? Not everybody believes that our values are the ideal or even good, even if they are obviously better than the Iranian regime's ideas.

What about the large amount of people in the world who think that we are doing evil by trying to spread our brand of consumerism around the world? They could argue that we are doing this through violence. I'm just trying to point out that the only thing that anybody can agree on is tactics. Either a certain tactic is acceptable or it is not. It shouldn't matter whether there are honorable intentions or not because almost universally people believe that they have honorable intentions.

I honestly believe that the side you are arguing for is more shaky in terms of a moral stance. I am saying that action X is either right or it is wrong. You are implying that X is only right when a virtuous person is doing it, but wrong when an evil person does it.

[Copernicus]

"You can't claim that you can take certain actions simply because your intentions are pure and good. Who gets to set this standard?"

Google "moral equivalency" and read a few articles. Its not a matter of your intentions being "pure and good", there are standards of human behavior that are demonstrably inconsistent with survival and advancement of the human race. If that werent true then ANY action can be justified based on an individuals personal set of values, the result of which is chaos.

[John Kilduff]

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Google "moral equivalency" and read a few articles. Its not a matter of your intentions being "pure and good", there are standards of human behavior that are demonstrably inconsistent with survival and advancement of the human race.

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Yes.

[John Kilduff]

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It might (arguably) be not wrong to bomb their nuclear development sites and/or defang their military's capabilities. Since the Iranian regime's goals are evil, though, it would definitely be bad for them to launch an attack on a neighboring country.


I don't accept as axiomatic that reasonable and reasonably enlightened governments, and evil regimes, should both be held to identical rules of international conduct. The evil regime forfeits some of its rights and expectations of being treated equally by virtue of being for evil. And it would be silly for the USA to consider France to be equally as likely a threat as Iran, or to treat them both identically.

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Don't you see the difficulty with this though? Who gets to decide who is evil and who is "reasonable and enlightened"? Is it majority rules? Does whoever have the most nukes get to decide? I'm pretty confident that those in power in Iran don't believe that they are evil.

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This is the real world we're talking about, not some abstract philosophical debate. A muderer/rapist and his victim might each believe they are right and the other party is wrong (the rapist might even believe his victim is wrong for resisting), but one of them is wrong and the other is right. The murderer/rapist is wrong, and the question of "who gets to decide" is irrelevant to the moral question (though it might be applicable to the pragmatic question).

You might think that there is nothing that is absolutely wrong, that all values are malleable and equally interchageable based on point of view, or something like that. I don't believe that. Some things are simply morally wrong regardless of prevailing opinion. You might dispute that in some abstract philosophical vacuum, but in the real world, I'd bet that the closer you are to actual evil, the more you will KNOW it is evil (like if you witnessed some of the inhumanities and atrocities in Hitler's death camps. At that point, wouldn't your speculations as to "who has the moral right to decide" go out the window? You'd KNOW the Nazis were wrong and committing evil, even if they thought they were doing good).

Who gets to decide? Everybody has that responsibility to become capable of making good moral judgments. You have that responsibility too. The only caution, as you point out, should be the awareness that occasionally you might be wrong or overlook someting, but that should not stop you from making judgments. It should only caution you from taking precipitous action on minimal evidence or on matters that are not highly consequential. You have the ability and right to determine and state that aspects of Shari'a Law are wrong, and evil in their implementation, or that the Iranian regime is wrong and acting evilly by hanging 16-year-old girls for accusations of promiscuity. You have to have confidence that you can make a good moral judgment and moral or ethical estimate.

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I also didn't mean to imply that we should treat all nations the same in terms of our foreign policy. But I do believe that all nations should be treated the same with respect to international law. We can't take one action and then denounce that same action performed by one of our enemies.

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Inherent in your statement seems to rest the assumption that all countries should be treated as equally responsible and equally meritorious of having any weapon or being permitted any action.

That just isn't so, any more than it is true of individual humans: some you really can trust better than others, some are more maliciously minded, some are more or less responsible, etc.

There is no reason all countries or regimes should have equal access to weapons. Some human beings must be forcibly denied certain leeway: the criminally insane must sometimes be kept physically quarantined so that they won't harm other people. An axe-murderer isn't permitted to walk freely around the city and countryside carrying a couple of hatchets. His rights are abrogated, and rightly so. How does your argument stack up against that? So why should certain states not be quarantined, so to speak, or have their access to dangerous materials and weapons restricted? If they are bad actors, if they follow an evil ideology, if they are even simply our enemies, then perhaps their leeway and capabilities should be limited.

[Taraz]

I think you guys are misunderstanding me. I'm perfectly fine with everyone claiming that Iran is an evil force and that we should fight against them (even if I disagree with the threat that they pose).

What I am arguing is that you can't claim that their tactics are somehow unfair or war crimes when they are the exact same actions that we take. What if Iran was taking no military action in Iraq right now? Would this inaction be evil as well because they represent evil ideals? Every action they take is not evil simply because they are making it.

I just can't believe that people are so shocked that Iran would take certain actions. I'm just trying to point out that many Iranian tactics are perfectly reasonable from their point of view. You would expect them to take all these actions. Our quarrel with them is completely ideological and has little to do with the means by which they act. I just don't see any reason to be outraged by their actions when it is the regime they are trying to establish that we find fault with.