No, it’s you who aren’t following the train of thought here. You’re calling “lobbing a few bombs” a war. Well, Clinton lobbed more than a few bombs at Iraq in '98 (4 days worth). If that was a war, then that was Gulf War II and what we have now is Gulf War III. According to you. Me, I try to use language as it is understood by most of the people who speak it. What Clinton did wasn’t “going to war”, and if Bush lobs a few bombs at Iran it won’t be “going to war”. As much as it will most likely be a stupid and dangerous thing to do, it won’t be “going to war”.
The vote for the AUMF was in 2002. The war started in 2003.
Certainly going to have to disagree on definitions here, John. For tell me of a single nation in the world that’s going to “let” the US (or any other country) bomb it without doing anything about it – unless, of course, it lacks any capability to retaliate on its own.
See Iraq for example of same.
As I said, your natural intelligence is letting you down here. Though I retract the Bush-like mental-lapse quip – I seriously doubt he has a third of your mental abilities. Not like that is high praise, mind you.
RedFury I can’t believe it took til post 42 for the most relevant piece of recent news to hit this thread.
Hopefully this won’t spark a war with Iran, but I do think they are going to get hit before the end of this administration.
Putin has been making noises recently about backing Iran, but I think secretly everyone would be relieved if we took out their nuke program.
I seriously wonder what it would do to the Iranian psyche. If they block the strait of Hormuz or sink a Carrier well, I think we’d be justified in calling it a war at that point.
Why, bless your heart, of course they do, and for very good reason: the American people are human, they have emotional buttons which can be pushed to certain and unfailing effect. Waving the bloody shirt and decrying attacks on our heroes, for instance, is an old and reliable standby. Now this is next-best, to be sure, what they mlight hope for is an actual and direct attack, some Iranian hothead fucking up royal, that would certainly be the discreet object of desire. But, failing that, a battleship might blow up under suspicious circumstances, an imaginary Iranian PT boat might launch phantom torpedos.
Starting a war is as easy as starting a fight, getting the other guy to start a war, or manufacturing a scenario to that effect is a bit trickier, but has been accompished many times, with varying degrees of plausibility.
Of course, if you want to sucker the other guy into throwing the first punch, you need to set an atmosphere of threat and animosity. Ideally, he should believe that you are just about to attack him, its inevitable and he might as well glean what advantage he can from the first blow.
Has it ever failed, waving the bloody shirt and blubbering crockidilian over our fallen heroes, so treacherously etc. etc.? Has it ever not worked? Ever?
John, I don’t know what the hell they’re up to with this, discerning motivations is just about impossible when the subject is both belligerent and stupid. But the assurances of an unidentified Congressional aide are something short of definitive.
Do the MOAB hangers actually need to be finished, or just well started in order to be used?
I suspect that they might be made to function even before the AF gets around to gold plating them and slapping on the decals.
In realpolitik it works on many levels. Though I’ve no doubt at least part of it is rattling Iran’s cage, it also sends a wider message: burying your shit under tons of sand in hardened bunkers won’t help you, buying fancy missiles from China or Russia won’t do any good against the wonderful invisible bomber.
If there were, for instance, dramatic political events in Pakistan, her nuclear programs might fall under the sway of Islamic radicals. We’re pretty sure Pakistan has some fairly sophisticated weaponry, we cashed the check. So we can’t really say this can only have one purpose and one alone.
In that case, racheting up Iran’s level of paranoia is merely a happy coincidence.
But the bombs have been under development for several years, so I doubt the recent decision to start altering stealth planes to carry them is indicative of any sudden new plan to use them in a particular place. After all, developing a bomb doesn’t do much good if you can’t put it in a plane to deliver it.
More likely its as 'luci says, their part of a general strategy to show possible enemies that burying stuff won’t necessarily keep it from getting blowned up.
Of course it isn’t. But that is one of the first things I thought about when I read this thread-- would these things even be ready before Bush is out of office? If you can’t answer that, then don’t go screaming about war. (That is the generic “you”, btw.) As we all know, it is incumbent on the folks making the argument to, well, actually make an argument. Of course the OP is phrased in such a way as to turn that debate protocol on its head: Prove that we are not going to war. Yeah, right. I’m all about proving negatives!!
Ok Red…you got me. I should have added a weapon that is in development (by the US for gods sake…the same country that takes about a decade to put out a new fighter plane) to my list of unlikely things like the giant wooden rabbit and the 1920’s style death ray (probably more likely than GW going commando in tights though, sure).
The Putin/Khameini talks interest me, but I honestly have no idea what they portend.
One reason I think that we might hit the reactors is because if we don’t the Israelis might. It’d be better if we smacked Iran than Israel. It’s sort of like getting spanked by Daddy rather than by your slightly older brother. What’s Iran gonna really do to the US? They can retaliate and face the complete destruction of their state with the possibility of reciprocating obscenely remote. On the other hand if they retaliate against Israel they are the heroes of the Muslim world, their state is completely destroyed but there is a possibility of ending Israel as well. In either scenario we go to war with Iran, but one is still better than the other. A war between Iran and the US can be a limited engagement like Desert Storm in 91, a war between Iran and Israel will not end until Iran is incapable of resuming anything resembling modern statehood. If Iran strikes Israel, Israel will very probably nuke Tehran, and likely Qom.
So much of our middle-east policy is designed to keep Israel from going Mad Dog. It is not in our interest to let Israel off of the leash. An attack by Israel on Iran if Israel survives would setup Israel as a Middle-Eastern Hegemon, taking rhetorical Muslim resentment and making it practical. As it is Muslims like to riot and pretend they care about the Palestinians when they really don’t. It’s their equivalent of leftist radicals protesting about Chiapas. If they felt that they were not safe from Israeli aggression across the bulk of Dar-al-Islam, it would change the dynamic a great deal. The threat of Israel would be more palpable and personal from Morocco to Pakistan.
In that regard I do see an attack by the Great Satan as a better option than an attack by the Little Satan.
Much more likely is that they’ll do what they’ve alway done. The cells inside America, and those south of the border should be of special concern.
Many seem to have forgotten that Islamism is still very much at war with the West and that Iran is at the nexus of a global, religiously fanatical, terrorist network. They won’t fight us the way we’d fight them. They’ll fight us the way they’ve been fighting us.
The rest of the claims don’t strike me as being any more probable.
With that being said, we’ve been “just about to attack Iran” for how many years now? Just about to, any day now, for years, mind you.
Personally I don’t have much use for the boy who cried Iran, nor do I find any of the myriad suppositions at all compelling. The development of bunker busters, for instance, seems more like an ad hoc rationalization than a smoking gun. Much more likely than plans for an attack on Iran, would be membories of hardened bunkers in Iraq and deep/fortified caves in Afghanistan. It’s something of a truism that the military prepares for the war it just got done fighting. That seems far more likely than that we would, with an army that couldn’t physically manage it, launch a major war against Iran.
I remain equally unconvinced by the fact that we have contingency plans for attacking Iran. Unless the top brass was recently replaced by orangutans, I’d hope that we have contingency plans for attacking virtually every strategically important location on the planet. The same level of ‘blah’ applies to most of the other claims of impending war; I simply haven’t seen any proof.
We’ll see what we’ll see, but after years of an ‘imminent attack’, I’m feeling that it’s a bit less imminent than all that.
Limited engagement? Like Desert War the First? The Second? The continuing conflict going on for 16 years now and about to widen?
Yep, that’s a limited engagement, all right. The only thing Bush seems to be able to do is get IN to a war. Getting out? What’s that? Someone else’s responsibility?
I’ve heard some who argued that Gulf War I never really ended. Citing the no fly zones and the Iraqis firing on US planes, they contend that the conquest of Iraq is merely the continuation of Bush the elders war.
Should Bush II lob a few bombs at Tehran, I am certain that in five or ten years some Bush III wannabee will ask America to ‘finish the job’ started by Bush II.
Yeah, yeah, we all know he’s a deranged little man – perhaps that’s why I like him (well, his politics, really – and his wife ain’t half bad either). Anyway, here’s what he had to say about this whole scenario:
