How does a non-citizen, non-resident commit treason against a country he owes no allegiance to?

So having poor people automatically disqualifies a country in the geographic west, speaking a western language, believing in a western religion, ruled by a western style democratic government, and having a population of mostly white people from being Western? Or does West mean only rich Anglo-Saxon countries? I suppose it's far easier to assert Western superiority by including only the successful countries in the definition.

That's why the army is now developing breast plate.

This. For the two centuries before the the World Wars, Iran/Persia basically alternated between being a British or Russian puppet, until the two decided to share and Russia got the north while the Brits got the south. This arrangement continued into World War 2 with the Ango/Russian invasion and occupation of Iran. Even in the second half of the twentieth century, the UK still had Iran by the balls. Iran was still stuck in a treaty with the UK that guaranteed the oil concessions on behalf of the Anglo-Persian Oil company until the 1990's (negotiated in the 1890's as a hundred-year treaty), with the split being something like 85% profits to the company and the rest to Iran (the usually being a 50-50 split). When the government tried to renegotiate this agreement, the UK and the CIA lead a coup against him that led to the overthrow of the constitutional monarchy and the installment of a puppet shah in `953.

The Anglo-Persian company has since gone on to do bigger and better things, like the Deepwater Horizon disaster, under its new name, British Petroleum, or BP.

They DO get buried away for millions of years. Where do you think petroleum and coal come from?

+1 Insightful

Most people don't realize that we have such maze of laws that the average American breaks three laws a day, often without even knowing it.

Two things:

1. Lebanon is not "Christian". The country was split out of the Ottoman Empire by the French, ostensibly for the purpose of protecting the Christian community there, but the French gerrymandered the territory to such an extent that Lebanon also ended up containing large Sunni, Shi'ite, and Druze communities. The Christians themselves are confusingly denominated among different branches, Catholic, Eastern (Greek) Orthodox, and Oriental (Syrian) Orthodox. Which explains why the whole Lebanese civil war was such a mess between Sunni vs Shiite vs Catholic vs Orthodox vs Druze vs Palestinian vs Israeli vs US vs communist.

2. What does the US (Christian) have to do in a conflict between Israel (Jewish) and Iran (Muslim)? Oh right, asserting its Christian influence! Oh wait....

Israel was hardly innocent in that conflict. Israel invaded southern Lebanon in response to the PLA having invaded there and used it as a base of operations to attack from. Israel then proceeded to occupy southern Lebanon for the next TWO DECADES, which also happened to have triggered the five-way civil war that pretty much tore apart the country, and continues to occupy a small strip of Lebanese land. Israel was also partially responsible for the notorious Sabra and Shtailla massacres during their occupation. Hezbollah was a Shii'ite (read, NOT Palestinian) militia formed during those years to combat the Israeli occupation. Wanting foreign invaders out of your country, or helping another people expel their occupies hardly requires religious fanaticism by any stretch of the imagination.

While Hezbollah has been accused of terrorism, for the most part they engage in military vs military combat, either as a conventional army or guerilla tactics, such as during the 2006 war, and they haven't been involved in suicide bombings since Israel left Lebanon. Some of their attacks, such as the rocket attacks during the 2006 war have hurt civilians, but their enemies are hardly innocent of that either and use tactics that, if done by non-countries, would be called terrorism. See the large amount of civilian damage in the bombings of Beirut, or assassinations of civilian Hezbollah politicians and leaders. Point being that the Lebanese were not the (initial) aggressors in the decades-long Israeli-Lebanese conflict.

Quite literally, yes. The oil companies got over $4 billion in tax breaks last year, and unlike NPR and PBS, these are for-profit companies already make quite a handsome profit.

The one area where the US (and the other industrialized countries in Europe, as well as Japan and South Korea) do not practice free trade is in agriculture. All these countries want to practice free trade for industrialized goods, so that they can sell their manufactured products at competitive prices, and also purchase raw materials and industrial goods cheaply, but they heavily subsidize agriculture. Often this is done in the name of "protecting farmers", "food safety", "national food security".

What this means in effect is that the poorer developing countries, where agriculture is the largest sector of the economy, and hoping to export their agricultural goods in order to get the money needed to build up their infrastructure and industrial base, are screwed. They have no way to compete on the international market with the cheap and heavily subsided farm goods of the industrialized countries, nor can they sell their products easily with all the trade barriers in place. The US has guaranteed prices for its farmers, and a lot of this is simply given away as food aid to countries. This helps feed them in times of famine of course, but it also means the poor farmers in those countries have a hard time making a living, as their crop prices have to compete against free.

....And what does Saudi Arabia have to do with Iran? They're close allies with the US and enemies with Iran, which happens to have a fair number of native Christians (mostly Armenians and Georgians) as well as Jews and Zoroastrians who actually are allowed to own Bibles and Torahs are allowed exemptions from certain Islamic laws such as the ones on alcohol consumption. Said Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians also have their own guaranteed members of parliament, as set by the Iranian constitution.

I certainly won't sugarcoat the condition of minorities in Iran as paradise, and as an atheist I wouldn't want to live in either country, but Iran is certainly leaps and bounds better than the Saudis in terms of minorities. The Saudis don't even tolerate other sects of Islam, and in fact they destroyed the tomb of Mohammed, as well as other prominent Muslim figures, in the fear that they might turn into objects of worship by Islamic sects that have traditionally venerated at those sites. Bringing up Saudi Arabia as a reason to stop Iran really is a red herring.

Take a look at this to see what Israel's leaders really think. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/checkpoint-washington/2010/07/netanyahu_america_is_a_thing_y.html

Netenyahu, when he thinks he's in private, says that America "is easily moved" and that he can get America to do what he wants easily. Then he proceeds to brag about how he successfully sabotaged the peace process.

Iran, too has been invaded before. Iraq invaded Iran within living memory and attempted to annex and wipe out Iran (Hussein cited the original Muslim invaders of Persia as rallying cries for his invasion). In doing so, Iraqi troops performed acts of brutality, and WMDs (supported by the US) against both military and civilian targets, as well as engaging in terror bombing.

Why isn't it acceptable for Iran to say "Never again" and defend itself against neighbors that would see Iran destroyed? (Also keeping in mind that iran hasn't engaged in any aggressive actions or invasions against her neighbors since the 18th century or so, while Israel has bombed and invaded all of its neighbors at some pont, and its most recent war happened in only 2006.

He may be nutty, but how many aggressive actions has Iran actually performed in the last hundred years?

Much is made of Ahmadinejad and his supposed nuttiness and his Holocaust denial, but what has he actually done. Iran actually has a large Jewish population minority the largest of any Muslim country. Much is made of his supposed threat to Israel, but Iran hasn't invaded any country in the last century and more, whereas Israel has invaded all of its neighbors on several occasions and even annexed land in just the last 50 years, and the US has invaded two of Iran's neighbors. Iran is building nuclear reactors where Israel and the US already has them. Why can Pakistan, which actively supported the Taliban, and terrorists in India, and harbored bin Laden, allowed to legitimately own nukes (and is even a US ally) while Iran can't even have reactors?

As for supporting terrorism? All but one of the 9/11 hijackers were from either Saudi Arabia or Egypt, the US's supposed allies. There hasn't been a single instance of an Iranian suicide bomber anywhere. Iran however, was invaded jointly by the UK and Soviet Union in World War 2 to provide a seaport for shipping supplies to Russia. The US deposed its former democratically elected President in the 1950s. When the despotic Shah was deposed, and Iraq invaded Iran, the US actively supposed Iraq, and weapons of mass destruction (poison gas) were used against the Iranians, while the US at best turned a blind eye, and at worse, aided and abetted Iraq. During said war, the US shot down an Iranian civilian airliner and to this day refuses to apologize for the incident. And now, Iran is suffering from sabotage of its facilities and assassinations of some of its smartest scientists.

Or did you have the silly impression that bad relations were solely because of the current Iranian president, or that all the bad blood came solely from the Iranian side?

The US's roads, bridges, and highways are massively subsidized. It's a myth that the gas tax comes anywhere near close to paying the required maintenance for the roads you drive on. Those roads are actually subsidized by all taxpayers, including non-drivers.

Gas taxes, and tolls account for only 51% of spending on road infrastructure in the United States. http://subsidyscope.org/transportation/highways/funding/state/

You can see from the comparisons that for infrastructurally-dense states like California, non-user fees make up over a quarter of the revenue for building and maintaining roads.