No, I haven't challenged the premise of the story. I was just responding to this bit that you said in one of your posts, which also appears to be somewhat tangential to the premise of the thread, as you have articulated it in your 18 Oct 07 - 03:06 PM post...

what you leave out is the suffering of the Iranian and Venezuelan populations, who, one would hope, deserve better than they are getting or are likely to get under the politics of extremist religious zealotry or exhausted communist ideology

I think we also deserve better than what our government is giving us. I think a lot of countries deserve better than what their governments are giving them. And I know our government and the other governments can do a lot better.

But I think you and I both know that most of the rhetoric that is being promoted in the media and by certain members of our government with respect to Iran is for the single purpose of softening us up for an attack on Iran.

Now if, as you say, you are concerned with human suffering, I expect that you will not want to visit on the people of Iran the amount of suffering that has been experienced by the people of Iraq as a direct result of the actions of the US government, and that you will condemn in the harshest of terms any ideas on the part of our government about extending the war to include Iran.

I think more than one million dead and countless numbers of injured and maimed in Iraq, and the total destruction of their country and its culture is more suffering by far than what they were experiencing in that country prior to our getting involved there (beginning with our responsibility for the rise to power of Saddam, and continuing to the current human catastrophe that is ongoing in Iraq, and which will become a genocide if it extends to Iran). Considering our track record of being the author of more human suffering in the world than any other country since the time of Stalin and Hitler, we need to stop exponentially increasing the amount of suffering in the world (for money, power, and oil) while using the alleviation of suffering as our cover.