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Warfare HAMAS attack on Israel, Oct 2023 & Iran’s Proxies.
- Thread starter Musashi
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There is a lot of misrepresentation of her words, along with a willful act of twisting the setting in which she said these words.
A Senate or Congress committee hearing, when public, is usually a circus. One side being complacent and friendly, they other side being hostile and excessively obtuse.
Complex questions requiring nuanced answered will be met with the demands for the witness to answer either "yes" or "no". And that's when the question's premise is factually correct and not based on inaccuracies or straight up lies.
Then you have the entire game of semantics with an answer open to multiple interpretations.
"The Intelligence Community assesses that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon"
Could mean, literally, right now Iran isn't building a nuclear weapon.
But also, that could also mean Iran isn't engaged in any process, at any level whatsoever (from theoretical to practical), of building a nuclear weapon.
Then there are various other factors coming in:
-it is an assessment. Assessments can be wrong, they do not necessarily reflect reality. They are, in a way, slightly more accurate than "educated guesses". But still, they aren't certainties.
-it comes from "the intelligence community". Anybody who followed the past 8 years of internal US politics, knows the intelligence community either signed on, or was said to have signed on, a significant number of dubious things. And when it comes to foreign politics, the "intelligence community" also made its fair share of catastrophic mistakes that either failed to prevent mass casualty events, or led to years of war. In other words, "the intelligence community" is far from being what one would consider the most trusted and reliable source in existence.
So, yes, in retrospect, when looking at the newspaper titles, it can give the impression of another iteration of "the boy who cried wolf", considering it goes back to 1992, or perhaps even before that. The use and abuse of hyperbole is greatly detrimental to any intelligent conversation, it muddies the water, it distracts from the actual issue, it creates false expectations, to the point its importance gets wasted.
The concern behind "Iran getting the Bomb" is just like "Iran actually getting the Bomb", in the sense that it is a long and slow process. But concerns, ideas and public perception are much less resilient to time than a dedicated endeavor to get something crucial. Especially when said endeavor is motivated by a long lasting fanatical hatred.
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Oh come on... let's just ignore all the stuff that has evolved over these years...
As @Mike1976 said, they didn't have anything that could deliver a weaponised nuclear payload, now they do and they were working on building 20,000 of these missiles (they were estimated to have between 15k - 3k and that has now changed because of Israeli operations over the last few days).
Other very notable events during recent times include:
- Stuxnet virus.
- Assassination of key nuclear scientists and physicists.
- Mossad/IDF operations on nuclear and other military sites since 2010.
Also, Tulsi's words are often simplified on purpose to make a point against any kind of Iran confrontation, here's what she actually said in full:
The most damning part of that statement:
Follow that with the IEAE's assessment that Iran is enriching Uranium at 60% purity and obstructing inspections in certain areas as well as hiding others.
No civilian nuclear programme needs to enrich Uranium that high, so the key question everyone should be asking is: why are they?
There's one answer, Iran hasn't provided an alternative one...
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And do not discount the possible support of other states assisting with Iran's nuclear-related programs (e.g., Pakistan, DPRK, or even CHN and/or RUS for that matter)
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Yep that's my suspicion too. Both NK and Iran made remarkable leaps in their ballistic missile development, skipping entire development stages. They may not have gotten support from a government, but they must have acquired external know-how.
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Hopefully the Trump Administration is keeping this guy at arm's length, and if anything, will let the Iranian people decide their own fate if/when the time comes . . .
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