"Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
Who's putting up a wall now?
It's funny that when it came to USSR and China,
we believed that people-to-people contact would improve relations. Why doesn't the same apply to Cuba and Iran?
I'd suggest that in the case of Iran it is a responsibility issue rather than a politics one. While they have just elected a more west-friendly president there are large parts of the country that are dangerous for outsiders. I'd guess the companies in question might prefer to lose a few sales rather than have the "you booked it, didn't you check where you were going first?" / "you should have warned as at booking time, it is all your fault!" argument.
I'm not sure where Cuba fits in with my little theory though.
>> there are large parts of the country [Iran] that are dangerous for outsiders.
Are you kidding me? Have you seen the Rick Steve's special on Iran? I'm bringing RS up because anecdotal evidence wouldn't fly much around here. But please open your mind and take a look.
Every account I've read of travel in Iran has been very positive. It is a much safer country to travel in than, say, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc.
Every account? I guess you missed the part where a former Marine of Iranian descent was arrested for trying to visit his grandmother. Or the part where a few kids went hiking on the Iranian border and were convicted of espionage.
Sure the Marine probably should have known better than to visit Iran having a government background, but if it was really a nice place to visit, shit like that wouldn't happen.
You can't really compare cities to entire countries unless those countries are city-sized.
For example, while Brazil has a per capita homicide rate of ~23 per 100,000 the state of Alagoas has a homicide rate of 60.3, and the Federal District has one of 34.1.
Some of those countries aren't all that big. Dominica is about on par with Washington D.C. and has a population 1/10th the size in an area only a few times bigger.
Sure, parts of Brazil are a war-zone, as are parts of Mexico in the bitter battle over drugs, but that just skews the average up for the rest of the country, meaning Washington D.C. is worse than many parts of Brazil.
To start splitting hairs, I bet there's parts of Washington D.C. that are on par with the worst parts of Brazil.
Not all Iranians dislike Americans, but to say that there aren't any who would like you dead, is naive.
The door swings both ways, though!
BTW, as citizens of a democracy, we are all responsible for the geopolitical actions of our government.
I mean, why would Iran dislike us? We didn't go help the UK overthrow their government and install a dictator or anything... OH, WAIT A SECOND.
It's not like we invaded both their neighboring countries and set up permanent military bases.... OH, WAIT...
The US does not have the moral high ground, but to think that just because you disagree with the government that most Iranians will just look past that... I don't think that's a safe bet.
I did not say we should support our government. I said that we are responsible for it. This is something that too few Americans understand and the reason why we currently have a shitty one.
For the same reason the US courtier class orchestrated the Vietnam Holocaust: the adult supervision class has to choose their battles. If a situation is not an existential threat to the US, the courtiers are given it as a playpen. Better to feed Iran into a meatgrinder than another city like Detroit.
Nice jab - but this predates Obama - in fact, go all the way back to the Philippine/American War [1] - and I'm sure it goes back even further. That war however, had news media support, yellow journalism at it's finest.
Nice, hospitable, open people, good standard of living, great skiing.
And a despotic government with no interest in war, just the subjugation of their own - and they'd still be a democratic secular republic if it weren't for the CIA orchestrated coup in '53 that resulted in the 79 coup, overthrowing the shah puppet govt.
This is such an odd fallacy. "My government has done awful things around the world". True. "Therefore I support other governments that haven't done awful things around the world". Invalid conclusion. They would have done one hundred times more awful things around the world if only they had the capability. Thank goodness they don't.
Indeed, that is a strange fallacy but I don't think it is one I've used. Both calling for someone to be killed and engaging in wars around the world are deplorable and I'd rather neither happened.
Your assumption that Iran would have done worse things if only it could have appears to be completely without basis.
> Indeed, that is a strange fallacy but I don't think it is one I've used. Both calling for someone to be killed and engaging in wars around the world are deplorable and I'd rather neither happened.
Then I must have misunderstood your point. Could you clarify what you are trying to say with "Iran has not been an aggressor in a war in the last 150 years. How does that compare to your own country? I know it puts mine to shame."
It is clear to me that Iran possesses the motive to put the US to shame when it comes to being violent and oppressive, but it does not have, thank goodness, the means or opportunity.
> Your assumption that Iran would have done worse things if only it could have appears to be completely without basis.
Not at all. Look what it does when it does have the means and opportunity. Rushdie's fatwa has already been pointed out to you, and you can look at everything that Hezbollah is doing around the globe under the orders of Khamenei.
If we start listing how many wars, coups, invasions, militant groups (including Al-Qaeda) were founded by the US, Iran will quickly fade into irrelevance :)
But also, if you look into the history of those nutty groups, they started out largely against the occupation by Israel and, "indirectly", the US. They were the fruits of unrest in the region stirred, then by Israel, and now by the US.
If it's of any lesson, there will be more nutty groups coming out of this mess.
Do they now. Was this bought to you by Fox News? Iran fund the reprehensible republican guard, and have horrors like Ashraf on their hands, but Iran stick to Iran.
Yes, they do. Iran has a huge influence outside their borders.
Iran has been funding and aiding al-Assad in the Syrian civil war. Hamas was, for awhile, funded almost entirely by Iran. Hezbollah has also largely been funded and supported by Iran. There is evidence that Iran provided weapons to the Iraqi insurgency during the Iraq War.
A pity if this is a concerted campaign, as I've mentioned here before visiting Iran is pretty straightforward if you're not from the US/UK and very worthwhile - blog post with some info here:
http://www.sarahandniall.com/2011/08/iran.html
What about sponsoring murders and bombings in other countries? To highlight just a few: the fatwa against Salman Rushdie (whose only crime was writing a book that Ayatollah Khomeini never read), which resulted in the death of his Japanese translator and numerous injuries and bombings; bombings against Jewish targets in places like Argentina (the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires killed 85); sponsorship of Hezbollah, which has attacked people around the globe; sponsorship of Palestinian terrorist groups, etc. The Iranian regime is a very bad actor and economic sanctions are warranted.
This is stereotypical "point spread" moral relativism. The standards with which American citizens hold their government to should of course be quite high, but by no means should we take failure to meet those standards to be in remotely the same league as the sorts of activities the Iranian regime undertakes.
The point is not how much has it done, but how much it would have done if it had the power. If Iran and the US had swapped places there would have been far more death and destruction across the world, all in the name of religious supremacy.
I can't say I like what the US is doing with drone strikes and repeated, unwinnable wars, but don't think for a minute that Iran would be a beneficient world hegemon. The world would be an awful place to live.
> If Iran and the US had swapped places there would have been far more death and destruction across the world...religious supremacy.
That's a supposition for which you have no support. The fact is that non-religious States have murdered far more civilians in the past 100 years than any religion has.
That's not a defense of religion. It's a simple statement of historical fact.
Iran is the primary sponsor of Hezbollah, a terror organization which targets civilians as a matter of policy and has participated in wars in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and Syria. Right now they are backing the Assad regime, for example.
The US's history of death squads in Central America is no different. I see no moral difference between the Iranian government and the US government.
Government, no matter whose government, is a brute. At the moment, the US is the biggest brute on the planet targeting smaller brutes. Like all governments, it also appears to be targeting its own citizens.
Let's clean up our backyard before we go bitching about the junked cars in other yards.
Surely the sites mentioned (Kayak, Expedia) just use third-party data from airlines and such to provide listings? If so, it's unlikely they are the ones removing Iran from the tables.
[edit: i looked at ita. it says that it supplies kayak and google flights. google flights shows flights to tehran (i checked). kayak does not (according to the article). that does not seem to support the idea that ita is filtering data, unless it is doing so at the client's request.]
"you probably want to connect to somebody a bit more down the food chain, with a better API."
Obviously I have no idea how anyone does it, but it seems plausible that it is the data providers rather than consumer-facing sites. Look at the ITA site:
I still see full flight data to IKA on my terminal, so it does not appear to be filtered from data providers (plural). I suppose there could be one provider that filtered it and a few sites depend on them.
I agree let them be countries are sovereign and if nukes are the problem why not international proliferation ?
Although a simple comparison the jist of it is no different than being in a standoff: 2 people pointing guns at each other and one side demands, "give me your gun".
Israel is not in breach of international law with its nuke program exactly because it is a non-signatory to the NPT.
Iran is a signatory and it has obligations under that treaty that it is not fulfilling.
And being vigilant on Iran is not just protecting US interests. It's protecting anyone who believes in freedom and liberal values. If Iran had nuclear weapons then it would be the second most awful world power to have them. It would be much worse in practice than NK having them though, because it actively sponsors terrorism around the world.
How do you know they would be the second most awful people to have them ? You are led to believe they are awful and if they have them they will use. What if they are not? What fact do you have?
I have no agenda I am nor pro Iran nor against, because I simply do not have enough facts or knowledge. I hear from the media they are terrible and almost as bad as North Korea... But what if they are not right? Can a US publication come out and say: "Hey Iranian leaders might feel they need nuclear weapons because otherwise they are helpless against an invasion by supreme powers just the Iraq and other nations were". Can a US news outlet make such a claim? Maybe some editorials here and there but the reality is present media is not entirely different than cold war Soviet media. Besides the obvious differences that you and I can both see, differences on agenda setting are not that great when it comes to SPECIFIC issues like Iran.
What would have happened if Iran was left alone? Who knows. What if US policy was to say: fine go make nukes but know the obvious, if you do anything stupid WW3 will be fought over the middleeast (and probably will be the case regardless or somewhere in Asia).
>Iran is a signatory and it has obligations under that treaty that it is not fulfilling.
This point I completely agree with. IF they are a signatory they are obliged...However, does the US adhere to every deal they signed ? Does any nation ? We bend our own constitution when we see fit.
We detain people for infinity without charging them in black prisons.
We fly an army of killer robots over any nation we please as long as they do not have the might or spine to respond and our tied to our foreign aid lifeline - where 1/7 people killed are children and 50% are innocent (according to a recent report also covered 2 days ago here on HN).
So who are we to tell them about obligations and sticking to the rules?
> How do you know they would be the second most awful people to have them ? You are led to believe they are awful and if they have them they will use. What if they are not? What fact do you have?
These are very worthwhile questions. I've spent a lot of time investigating this subject and have come to certain conclusions. It would be foolish for anyone to believe me just because I've made these assertions on a forum on the internet, so I would encourage anyone interested to do their own research and come to their own conclusions.
Their government are an evil, theocratic, messianic cult who care nothing about their people but do care about promoting barbarism internally and terrorism externally to further their dispicable agenda. There are few more evil governments on the planet right now.
If you want to be sad about the punishment of the innocent Iranian people, be sad that Khomeini's thugs murdered, jailed or otherwise incapacitated all the real liberals during that country's revolution.
It's a curious thing, good vs evil. It seems to me that there are few true Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader scenarios in history. Rather, every political leader has a bit of Darth Vader in them. There's something about that power that brings out the scum in all of us.
I never mentioned good. The Iranian government is evil. Most of the governments of the rest of the world are just human, that is, as you say, morally mixed.
Good and evil are such comforting terms, but hardly applicable. Do you honestly see no good in Iran, or evil in the rest of the world?
Iran and Israel have been the only major sources of stability in the region in the past twenty years, surely that's certainly good. If they hadn't had to endure sanctions then Iran would be one of the shining examples of prosperity in the middle east, however a bloody Shi'ite vs Sunni showdown would have likely occurred by now.
I'm not talking about Iran, I'm talking about the Iranian government. It is certainly evil to the extent that any "good" that there might be in it is completely irrelevant. Unfortunately the government is verging on totalitarian, so the people of Iran barely have a say. It's not a good thing that such a despotic, tyrannical regime has been stable, nor was it a good thing that Iraq under Saddam was stable.
It is deeply sad for the Iranian people who are generally well educated and cultured that they have such a government. The west [EDIT: I really mean the UK and US] has a substantial case to answer in bringing about the Iranian revolution, but it is more of a shame that Khomenei expunged the liberal and secular movements after that revolution.
Three months ago when we were trying to book from California to Tehran it was impossible to find flights. It seems google brought back Tehran to their list now but many others don't have it yet.
Sucks to be innocent victom of a conflict that you didn't do anything for it. I can not even do a anything to change either.
Aren't flights from UAE to Iran super frequent and cheap? I'd just fly to DXB or AUH (ideally, Etihad, one of the underrated airlines in the world) and then book the Iran leg independently, maybe even on arrival.
Who's putting up a wall now?
It's funny that when it came to USSR and China, we believed that people-to-people contact would improve relations. Why doesn't the same apply to Cuba and Iran?