…there are no solutions to the problem of human conflict that will eliminate the need for force at times…

In 1760, slave-owners and their supporters could just as easily have written that no solutions to the problem of allocating labour power would eliminate the need for compulsion. Then came William Wilberforce, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano and many others, and the world changed.

People will never stop exploiting one another, just as people will never fully get rid of our aggression. But the abolition of slavery showed clearly, and for the first time, that people could make a collective choice, to renounce violence and exploitation in our institutions. Today, thanks to the anti-slavery movement, virtually the whole world recognises the slaver as a criminal. After Kellogg-Briand and Nuremberg, the laws recognise the criminality of using the violence of war as anything but the absolute last resort. Thanks to a long line of heroes, we know we have alternatives to violence. And we also know that we cannot continue to wage wars in a society where our wealth, and perhaps our survival, depend on cooperation.

It is hard to find even hawks in Washington who are keen on airstrikes, given the difficulty of the mission, the uncontrollable effects on the region and the opposition from the American public, Congress, much of the US military and allies of the US. Nor is an Israeli strike possible without US backing…

It seems pretty clear that using military force against Iran won’t work. It seems equally clear that, while neither we as individuals nor our political leaders can expect to negotiate with the hard men in power in Tehran. But we have a lot of evidence to suggest the majority of Iranians do not support those hard men.

So you have a choice: you can complain that your government, your military, your politicians won’t use the force their own prudence prevents them from using. Or you can embrace a non-violent solution, which means you can do something. A mass movement toward a citizen’s dialogue, with millions of people from the West supporting the desire of the Iranian people for more freedom; individuals would not have to wait for our governments to do that. Whatever your problems with that proposal, it makes more sense than cursing the government for not bombing

A permanent state economy and fantasies of world power may appeal to Hassan Abbasi, but according to all of the indicators, the vast majority of Iranians, particularly young Iranians, don’t share his opinions. Likewise, I seriously doubt Ghandi thought he could negotiate with an individual such as General Dyer, but he understood that he could reach past the leaders to the British people.

By the way, providing cites helps your case; making assumptions about the one thing you can’t know, the way someone else thinks, does not.

Commandant of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, said on state television. “God willing, the 21st century will see the defeat of the U.S. and the Zionists, and the victory of freedom-seeking nations of the world. The final goal of the [1979] revolution is to create global Islamic rule and a regime of law to be led by the Imam Mahdi”.

The [Iranians] President’s chief strategist, Hassan Abbassi, has come up with a war plan based on the premise that “Britain is the mother of all evils” — the evils being America, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, the Gulf states and even Canada, all of whom are the malign progeny of the British Empire. “We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization,” says Mr Abbassi. “There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them… Once we have defeated the Anglo-Saxons the rest will run for cover.”

The IRGC chief warned that Iran was seeing through “critical days” and “fate-determining years”. He described the purpose of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution as the “Salvation of Muslims” from the hands of the “oppressive U.S. and Israel”.

John ignores what they say because they’re religious. He refuses to take them at their word and insists his suicidal pacificism is something that impresses Muslims.

Muslims are only impressed by self-confidence and projection of power.

For anyone who does not yet understand that most of us committed to non-violence understand the stakes, and the realities, this source may prove helpful.

Like I need lessons from you. Go back to your smoke circle.

Iran must be bombed into submission , or they will strike first.

A huge amount of history refutes your characterization of non-violence as “know nothing do nothing”. Non-violence in the Christian and Jewish traditions runs from the beginning of active non-violent practise in the Hebrew scriptures, through the Sermon on the Mount, Praxis Apostolian and the early Christian Church, and into the twentieth century, where people of all faiths, armed with nothing more than courage of heart and strength of mind, successfully defied some of the most powerful and brutal regimes in history.

You don’t have to learn this history, but endlessly repeating old news, such as the tautology that violent people behave violently, does not make for a convincing argument. Nor does ignoring the volumes of literature of the practise of non-violence by calling it “do-nothing” make for either a cogent case or a useful method of action.

This has particular relevance in the current situation. Almost all of us consider a nuclear-armed theocracy in Iran a bad thing; bad for the Iranians and bad for everyone else. But it also seems quite clear that if the governments concerned can imagine only a violent solution, they will do nothing, because the risks associated with violence simply carry too high a price. Neither Israel nor the US has agreed to pay that price for the past five years. I doubt the situation will change now that the Republican party faces an election and a public tired and disgusted with the war they have. At this point, the evidence suggests that the violent solution to Iranian nuclear proliferation has probably failed. This means that unless we find a non-violent approach that works, we and the Iranians will have to live with a nuclear-armed theocracy.