You guys are so selfish. Think of Joe Lieberman. All he wants in life is to bomb Iran. That’s all. A simple thing really. He’s been yearning for such a release for years. Would you deny him that pleasure? Think of all the others who would have a weight lifted from their shoulder: Cheney, Mrs. Clinton, Kristol, Obama, Krauthammer, McCain…
Agreed! How else will Americans learn geography?
I’m just going to agree to disagree on this. We’ve gotten off topic, and the original thesis of this thread has been beaten to death anyway. I’ll just add that there is no reason we couldn’t bomb Iran’s troop as they cross into Iraq (or before) and not hit our own troops in the process. You can’t smuggle 100,000 troops across the border.
You really have nothing to bring to this discussion, do you? Ah well.
And you are living in a fantasy world.
-XT
[QUOTE=xtisme]
You really have nothing to bring to this discussion, do you? Ah well.
Kid – and I mean that in an admiring way – would that a quarter of the so-called adults here had both your wit and insight.
Not to be as is clearly demonstrated in this thread.
Trust you never get derailed, in my son and nephew you have two sure votes for whatever Congressional position you choose.
Clearly, that’s not just a body cavity you carry upon your shoulders.
Cheers and keep on keeping on.
Sorry, I’m old and hardly hip with the lingo.
As long as you pick and choose to ignore responses to my well exposed arguments, yep, you are right as rain.
Could do the same to your mostly inane jingoistic posts, but I’m not about to lower myself to that level. I rather live in reality if that’s alright by you, Latin-American, American.
Invade Holland (surely you’d find a reason to agree) and we’ll talk about fantasies – never mind Iran. Talk about fantasies…have you enjoyed the past six years of same?
Kid – and I mean that in an admiring way – would that a quarter of the so-called adults here had both your wit and insight.
Not to be as is clearly demonstrated in this thread.
Trust you never get derailed, in my son and nephew you have two sure votes for whatever Congressional position you choose.
Clearly, that’s not just a body cavity you carry upon your shoulders.
Cheers and keep on keeping on.
Sorry, I’m old and hardly hip with the lingo.
I think you’re supposed to say you shnizzle, and his dog is homely.
More for the gallery than because you will either understand or comprehend it, I’ll take the time to explain my own reasoning. Not being about dick size, I figure a Spaniard won’t really get it anyway.
Apples to oranges: The US military was designed and built to fight large scale engagements on a set piece type battlefield. It does this very good…in fact, it does it better than any other nation on earth today. This isn’t boast. Its reality.
What the US does NOT do well is fight an insurgency…such as that in Iraq. I’m starting to come to the realization that NO ONE can fight such a thing effectively. I’m looking at the disaster that the Soviets had in Afghanistan and our own twin fuckups in Vietnam and Iraq and I’m coming to the conclusion that if the insurgency is popular enough, if the people fighting it are dedicated enough, even if they don’t comprise the majority of the population, that its a no-win situation for any major power, regardless of how strong their military is.
The fantasy world you live in Red is that of a crumbling US military unable to defeat a power such as Iran IN A SET PIECE WAR. I know you can’t wrap your mind, filled with hate and loathing for all things America as it is, around the difference between an insurgency fighting from the shadows and a nation state that unmasks its military in the open. The US would tear through Iran’s farce of a military in short order if they were stupid enough to bring it out in the open…and with open hostilities. Thats not boast…thats reality. We wouldn’t be fighting them with the troops in Iraq…we’d be hammering them to scrap with air strikes, pounding them with artillery…but the time they actually engaged us (in Iraq of all places…which means WE’D be on the defensive! Its to laugh) our regular forces would complete the destruction.
Of course, in the real world this would never happen. And in the real world there would be the ‘then what’ moment. What would we do AFTER Iran’s military was a smoking ruin? Invade? Thats a joke. With what? And assuming we could scrape up the troops to invade ( :dubious: ) it would be like Iraq and Vietnam combined…and nightmare.
Its ludicrous. The entire thread is a fantasy fever dream. We don’t HAVE the military force to invade and occupy Iran. We may not have had THAT kind of force BEFORE fucking Afghanistan and Iraq…let alone now that our dick is in the grinder in both places. I don’t care how clueless Bush is…reality IS. The reality being WE DON’T HAVE THE COMBAT POWER TO INVADE SPAIN (or the equivalent of a nation controlled by a really tough girl scout troop…take your pick)…let alone Iran.
-XT
Well, all those capital letters were a big help! Makes it much, much clearer!
War with Iran can’t happen because we can’t invade, and if we don’t invade, its not war. And we can’t invade because it would be stupid. And people/nations don’t do stupid things. Sometimes they do crazy things, but that’s crazy, so it doesn’t change the fact that nations don’t do stupid things, because it doesn’t count.
So if I’m crazy, I don’t have to fly the mission?
If you’re crazy, I have to ground you, and you *can’t *fly the mission, even if you wanted to.
OK, I’m crazy. Ground me.
I can’t ground you. You’re not crazy, you don’t want to fly the mission, nothing crazy about that.
OK, I want to fly the mission.
Go right ahead, I’m not going to stop you…
Obviously they didn’t work because equally obviously you didn’t get it. No real surprise there. I kind of figured it was a waste of time.
Carry on.
-XT
I’d agree with both those conclusions but would still class the idea of even ‘just’ air attacks on Iran as batshit crazy. It wont come to the clashing of large conventional armies but Iran has the capacity to inflict enormous damage on US interests in the middle east.
The first and most obvious point is that the US has had great difficulties in dealing with a largely Sunni insurgency in Iraq (ie one based upon a small percentage of the population) and has had comparitively little trouble from the Shia majority who to date have largely sat out the occupation awaiting your departure. Iran would certainly sic the Shia militias on US forces in the event of an attack and the US position in Iraq becomes orders of magnitude more difficult and probably untenable. You do not want the entire country to be Anbar, especially when your already overstretched position is already scheduled to be stretched further with the pending departure of British forces from the south.
Secondly their logical response is to wind up the Shia population of eastern Saudi Arabia (which is where the oil is) and Hezbollah in Lebanon (ie Israel will get dragged in as well and the war spreads).
Finally the US has had enough trouble with Islamic militancy already that I think you’d be well advised to steer clear of stirring up more. One of their chief recruiting points is that the US is waging a war on Islam, a position a lot easier to sell were the US to attack it’s third Islamic state.
You’ve hit on the brilliance of The Leader’s plan. Half of the Shia will claim the Great Satan is attacking Allah, and the other half will claim Bush is after the oil! An immediate factional split, like how Reagan split the Russian Revolution into Menshiviks and Bolsheviks! They attack each other, the Sunni attack them, and the Kurds attack anybody who so much as looks at Greater Kurdistan. Or claims to own any of it.
And where are the American troops! Smack dab in the middle, that’s where! in the best possible position to take advantage of the chaos and confusion! In any direction we attack, we hit the enemy! Its simply the inner encirclement strategy of Custer, writ large!
Sure, its crazy! But its not stupid!
I sense some sarcasm here my good man which does you no credit. Say what you like about Custer, he was no big girl’s blouse scared of so called reality, there was no lily-livered ‘cut and running’ from our George. Outstanding see-it-through commitment from that man!
Have you confused Custer with his mentor, Gen. Jubilation T. Cornpone, famous for Cornpone’s Defeat, Cornpone’s Rout, and Corpone’s Utter Humiliation?
Dude, it’s true, it was a total wasted of your time writing that meaningless post. Then again, what you do with your time is no business of mine.
But since everything I write that you dislike – mostly all – you choose to ignore, I’ll just repeat the same things I’ve said upthread. If not for you, for the peanut gallery.
1-WTF said Iran would fight a conventional war against any sort of US attack? Surely not me. Quite the contrary actually. As you yourself point out – after having done so myself, but of course you ignored it – if nothing else Vietnam and Iraq have both proven and shown that your mighty forces CAN be beat beat by means of asymmetrical warfare and guerrila tactics, never mind outright terrorist tactics against American targets worldwide…where once again, you echo my own prior post, while claiming “I contribute nothing.” Insert rolleyes -----> here <----- for your better understanding.
2-READ (caps just for you) the article I linked to: Iran: Gulf War III?. It points to Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities…and they have plenty, both self-made and purchased from Russia and NK. Should the US air strikes fail to wipe them ALL out, both the Green Zone and US Army camps in Iraq would be sitting ducks for a massacre. No need to invade.
3-And attack against Iran would ignite the so far relative Iraqi Shiite hostility vs Americans…and Iran could/would provide them with plenty of weapons. Just what the US needs…open warfare against yet another (and the most powerful) group in Iraq.
3- As also mentioned priorly and ignored (quite the habit there, bud!), a major consideration in the event of any hostilities would be the Iranian proximity to the major shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. Iran has the potential to severely disrupt maritime commerce before being subdued, and a guerilla campaign would continue being a threat to shipping even IF the Iranian regime capitulates.
Lastly and off-topic, thanks again for taking your usual potshot at Spain – it wouldn’t be a post of yours if it didn’t contain one. But I’d hardly call the 14th most powerful country by Military: Military expenditures a “bunch of girlscouts.”
But go ahead, bomb us too. After all, if you spend as much on “defense” as the next fifty nations combined, you deserve to be Kings of The World if only by Social Darwinism.
Rah rah! USA #1!
Hablamos, latino-americano. O no.
I hate to say it but I was freaked out this morning by Fox News. I rarely watch it for more than a minute at a time, but they were playing to the OP. The talking heads were quoting ‘sources’ who claim that if the US pulls out of Iraq then Iran will move in and there will be tension with Saudi Arabia (and possible shooting) and we’ll be paying $9 a gallon for gas.
At this point, an Iranian invasion would probably be a best-case scenario for the Iraqis.
Well, that doesn’t really touch on the OP, since “staying in Iraq” ≠ “invading Iran”. In fact, it pretty much precludes it. But could those “sources” be the Iranians themselves-- who just said the other day that they were ready to jump in and fill the void when we left?
Rather, what I saw from Fox yesterday (Brit Hume’s Special Report) was a downplaying of the nuclear capability of Iran. Nothing special, just the news article that all the outlets have going about El Baradai’s recent report that Iran is falling below it’s own projections of how much nuclear material they can generate.
That’s reassuring, at least, but here’s the spin Fox is putting on the story: “IAEA Report Says Iran Has Bomb Plans”
WaPo’s take on it: “IAEA: Iran Cooperating In Nuclear Investigation”
Here’s the Fox news story I was talking about: Report: Iran Producing Less Nuclear Fuel Than Expected
OTOH, check out the “Battle of the Headlines,” John.
Looks like the mutually hostile rhetoric just keeps keep ratcheting-up.