[FridayoLeary]

Oil for starters. Iran is the principle destabilising element in the middle east. By proxy they are participating in every conflict.

A nuclear iran would be completely intolerable, never mind that their regime might just be lunatic enough to use them.

Add that war is bad for the whole world.

So the us benefits that it protects her economic (and strategic) interests in the ME, which are real and extremely important, at the low cost of a limited air campaign.

There are further moral arguments, but i'm answering your question in the most direct way.

[twixfel]

Israel is the principal destabilising element in the Middle East. It cannot even be argued at this point. It's them, the Israelis.

[FridayoLeary]

That is true in much the same way that the UK caused ww2 by refusing to make peace with the Germans in 1940. Or the soviets for selfishly resisting their invasion attempt.

Israel doesn't start any wars, it just finishes them. Hamas, hezbolla, syria, yemen and iran started up with Israel for no good reason. So they end up with a bloody nose. That's on them.

[twixfel]

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as we speak and is expanding settlements more and more in the West Bank. The end game of the Israelis is very clearly complete ethnic cleansing. Israel is no victim here, it's a settler colonialist state that happens to be successful in being a settler colonialist state.

> Hamas, hezbolla, syria, yemen and iran started up with Israel for no good reason

If the UN decided to put a country for the Roma in the middle of India, how do you think that turn out? Very well or very badly? Is it surprising that everything turned out so badly in the ME with regards Israel? Seems obvious to me that putting a new country in the middle of a colony just as said colony is gaining independence seems like a shit idea?

Simply put, the very creation of Israel was fundamentally destabilising. We basically torpedoed our relations with the entire Islamic world (and especially the Arab world) just for the sake of some mostly (at that time) European colonists in Israel (who later became Israelis). That was retarded as shit. Say what you like about how good it was for the Israelis, but for us that was shit geopolitics, shit realpolitik, and a shit deal. Israel has now, rather predictably, become an ethnofascist state run by a (war)criminal. And we enabled them the whole way. And for what??? How exactly has anyone in the West actually benefited from this? It was clearly good for Israel and for Israelis, but how have we benefited from this???

[FridayoLeary]

i actually hate it when people pull the victim card and i can't stand apologists either but happily i have a very pragmatic answer;

the West benefits from israel that at least one country in the region isn't an authoritarian hellhole and actually contributes to the global economy beyond just providing petrol.

You might resent it but that's the truth.

[twixfel]

That's my point though, that's not pragmatic in the slightest. It would be ruthlessly pragmatic to favour the 400M Arabs and 2B Muslims over the 10M Israelis. The Israeli economy is 0.5% of global GDP.

> region isn't an authoritarian hellhole

It's colonising the West Bank, committing genocide in Gaza, is led by a (war)criminal... Israel is arguably worse than many of its neighbours. I honestly don't care how good gay people have it in Tel Aviv when they're simultaneously committing genocide in Gaza or settling the West Bank like it's 1899. And yeah Israel is a democracy but they use their democratic choice to vote for a war criminal who's in bed with the settlers and other theocratic extremists. So Israel is really no better than many of its neighbours and arguably worse than many of them. And it's only getting worse, the Israelis are only becoming crazier and more extreme. And now they've got the US into a war with Iran. Sorry, 0.5% of GDP: not fucking worth it.

[FridayoLeary]

You are exaggerating. Israel is not that bad and they and the Arab states have basically worked things out by now. And America are not in a war with Iran. They are simply engaging in bigger arms diplomacy.

[komali2]

It's seeming more and more like Israel, which propped up Hamas for example, is the principal destabilizing element in the region, and therefore really it's America, which spearheaded the original overthrow of Iranian democracy, alongside all its other middle eastern meddling for the last fifty years.

[shihab]

> Iran is the principle destabilising element in the middle east

Says Israel, the nation who tore up every single international laws, directly led campaign against UN and ICC, and whose right-wing (ones in power now) have been dreaming about a Greater Israel that threatens territorial integrity of like 10 different ME countries.

[34679]

>Oil

If we want their oil, we can buy it like reasonable people do. What you're referring to is armed robbery.

>Iran is the principle destabilising element in the middle east

Is this a joke? The country that has not started any wars in its 300 year existence is not the "destabilizing element". That would be the country that has attacked Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran this year alone.

[amluto]

This is a strange comparison. Iran funds the Houthis, for example, who commit plenty of acts of war. And if you’re talking about starting wars, it’s worth noting that the present war in Gaza was started by Hamas. (I’m making no statement about whether the actions of either side or justified — I’m just pointing out that, in the present shooting war, the first shots were fired by Hamas, not Israel.)

[34679]

You ignore decades of aggression and occupation in Gaza, along with the 4 other countries Israel has decided to launch wars against this year. "But Hamas" is not a convincing argument.

[amluto]

I’m not ignoring anything. The situation in Gaza and elsewhere has been horrible for decades. Israel has imposed various forms of nastiness on Gaza, and I imagine that Israel’s government and many of its people saw some of that nastiness (heavy handed restrictions on imports to Gaza for example) as necessary, since Hamas quite regularly converted whatever materials they could into weapons to fire across the border into Israel. Meanwhile, I imagine that Hamas, and many of the people of Gaza, saw that as necessary because Israel treated them poorly. It was a catch-22. Meanwhile, Iran most definitely interfered heavily from the sidelines, and I imagine that Iran’s government had reasons that seemed valid to them.

The situation was and remains unstable, and the factors that made it unstable were did not come from just one place. And you don’t have to look hard to find acts of war initiated by multiple different parties in the area.

I think that claiming that any one country “decided to launch wars” against multiple other parties ignores a whole lot of complexity.

[FridayoLeary]

You misunderstood me. I was talking about oil from the other gulf states. About 25 percent of the global oil supply goes through the straight of Hormuz. If iran were to disrupt that it would be disastrous for obvious reasons.

It's logical for the West to work to prevent that from being a possibility.

Iran/persia is far older then 300 years old. But again you somehow missed the point. I was talking about the current 40 year old regime, which while not having directly started any wars, have since the beginning declared their intentions to do so against America and Israel.

Really you are being deliberately obtuse.

[34679]

>I was talking about the current 40 year old regime

Oh, and how did it come to power?