Okay, sorry. My mistake.
I have to say I don’t doubt you for one second about this.
And I can only second the idea about not being hasty in our military adventures. I only wish I had a sense those people making these decision in Washington felt that way.
I found excellent articles on Pahlavi and Mossadegh on Wikipdia, with plenty of useful links. It sounds to me like there’s been a longstanding feud between urban reformers and the traditional agricultural powers and the mullahs … which you can still see going on in Iran.
I asked about this possibility here a few weeks ago. The reason I saw it as a very real possibility is we would be staged to attack from Afghanistan in the west and Iraq in the East.
As far as Syria, MHO is we leave Isreal and a somewhat-moderate Jordan to keep them in check.
I’m pissed by this news. We have an office pool on which country Bush was going to invade next and I’ve got ten bucks riding on North Korea.
In yet another thread (I think GD) we got to discussing which country would handle NK while we were in the ME. From what I remember the general consensus was that China, Russia and Japan would handle them until we could get there. (I could be remembering that wrong, though)
FWIW, the Pentagon calls the Hersh piece a load of hogwash.
Well, that certainly settles that!
Yes, who ever heard of the Pentagon keeping secrets from the American people!
If/when we do start some sort of “pre-emptive strike” in Iran, I think I know how Rummie will spin it for the media:
"We had the intelligence all along. What happened was a simple clerical error. ** Iran, Iraq**. It’s a simple mix up and we’ve traced it to the source. A temp in the Pentagon secretarial pool just hit the Q instead of the N.
Look, we knew Saddam was a bad guy and the intel looked right.
Do we regret that error? Of course. Should she have used Spell Checker? Absolutely. Do we consider our attack on Iraq to be a mistake? Of course not. The war’s gone well, just like we’ve told you all along and so now it’s time to move on to the right target.
Which is not to say we attacked the wrong target before, just not the correct right target. You see the difference? Now we know. There are WMD in Iran and we’re going to find them this time." We figure, 6 months tops and then the Iranians will be cheering us into Tehran, just like they did in Kabul."
Hey, I just report! Don’t shoot the messenger!
What’s really scary is just how Rumsfeldian that sounds.
Hey Leaper, think fast
BANG
I am doing my best to fight off the malicious urge to send Harborwolf a singing telegram…
You had it almost perfect. Just needs one little edit: “We had the intelligence all along. What happened was a simple clerical error. Iran, Iraq. It’s a simple mix up and we’ve traced it to the source. A temp in the Pentagon secretarial pool, hired during the Clinton administration, just hit the Q instead of the N.”
Put me in the ‘knock out some bases that we think are producing chemical etc agents’ camp.
But toss this out there…
There have certainly been some speeches bitching that Iran is attempting to influence Iraq now that it’s all crazy-destabilized and such. This could simply be a means of payback for that in a sort of ‘knock it off or you’ll get something to REALLY worry about’ way.
Alternately, we could bomb some bases and they could come into Iraq from the east in an attempt to seize some territory and oil fields for themselves. Could the US forces in Iraq fight the insurgency and an invading army at once? You make the call.
This sort of action would encourage the Iranians to work hard at destabilizing Iraq. It’d also encourage them to up their support of active non-governmental anti-US groups, what some would call terrorists.
If we start bombing Iran, we’d better be ready to conquer the country too.
Bush will certainly get his “blood will flow like rivers”.
The final battle between good and evil.
Armegeddon.
The hard part is deciding who is evil.
What was the re-election rate of Representatives and Senators in 1970 or 1972, when things had obviously gone horribly awry in Vietnam?
You can apparently sell a lot by implying those who oppose you are traitors.
That said, I’ll need more evidence before I believe the U.S. is going to start a war that so far it hasn’t actually done anything to start.
And I still say this seems to be exactly what he and his friends want.
Of course we could, we would just need more soldiers. This is just the strategy that would get us in a situation where we have to reinstate the draft to save our necks. It also lets lil’ Georgie and his pals bring “freedom” to this region of the world, take over all the oil fields and prove those nasty mean Old Europeans wrong.
BLECH!
But I still think they will do it.