Nope, you’re right. I now admit that I don’t think it’s possible that US ground troops will invade Iran until and unless things escalate much farther out of control–namely, we (or Israel) hit them with airstrikes, Iran retaliates against Israel, US forces in Iraq, or US ships in the Gulf, and we, after a long and protracted air/missile war, finally send in some ground troops. Where would such troops come from? Beats me–but that didn’t stop Bush from invading Iraq with just a third of the troops his father used to push Saddam out of Kuwait (let alone try to take and hold all of Iraq). But I now don’t see that happening until many other things happen first, which puts it too far into the future at this point, and involves too many “ifs.”
Now, airstrikes–that, considering the administration’s current rhetoric and track record (I’m having a lot of flashbacks between the Iranian and Iraqi WMD- and “grave and immediate threat” claims…), seems extremely likely to me.
(and, granted, it wasn’t exactly a “bat of an eye” … it was a good year and a half, and a dead thread; you may consider this a fresh poll, if you like)
Uh, CynicalGabe, you do realize that we are not supposed to divulge future events to those in the past, right? This gets back to Central, your time travel license is toast.
Either we or Israel make a “surgical strike” on “nuclear facilities”. Iran retaliates by lobbing a missile at either Israel or our troops in Iraq. We take this “terrorist attack” as a call to invade, and we take over Iran.
I think Iran has always been in our plans, but we didn’t expect Iraq to be so much trouble and have switched our plans to “let’s lure the extremists to Iraq” for the time being. I don’t think we will invade until we get some sort of handle in Iraq. But I have no doubts we will invade and no doubts that the reason we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq was to have bases to attack Iran from. I think the plan is just to take over the middle east so it won’t give us trouble anymore, and Iran is the keystone of that plan.
Hmmm. How do you launch a surgical strike on some five dozen possible sites–many deeply bunkered–in Iran? And why would Iran, under attack, launch a single retaliatory missile at Israel or US troops in Iraq? And if you don’t think we will invade until Iraq is under control, but then say you have no doubts that we will invade, are you going on record as saying that the US is on track toward getting “some handle in Iraq”?
My money—not an invasion, but a lot of American aid/relief workers after the tragic and mysterious Iranian reactor meltdown in early 2007 that left over half the total area of the country as an irradiated “zone of alienation.”
It doesn’t matter. The point is that the news reports we did a surgical strike, ideally with lots of nice maps and graphics illustrating the technology we used.
What else are they gonna do? They don’t want to spend their whole arsenal just to piss us off. It may be more than one missile, but I don’t think they have the resources to do much more than shake their proverbial fists at us. These are the same guys that couldn’t win against Iraq, remember.
Heh. I have no idea. I think nobody really expected it to be this big of a pain. But we can’t stay in Iraq forever. At some point we’ve got to either take over the place or go home. And I doubt we’ll go home.
An Iranian offensive against Iraq is probably what the Pentagon is hoping for. The US would quickly decimate a land or air assault. Whatever the US misses would be destroyed when the Navy unleashes its cruise missiles.
But that still doesn’t stop Iran’s nuclear clock.
>>> Let me just add: No one is examining the psychological dimension of a hypothetical US-Iran war. I’m opposed to combat, inasmuch as the US cannot achieve its LT objectives re: halting the nuclearization of Iran.
That said, once hostilities commenced, millions of on-the-fence Americans would side for the US military to beat the hell out of Iran. The resentment over the 1979 hostage episode hasn’t subsided much among older Americans. A major clash would cause that latent hostility to boil over in a very nasty way.
[Moderator Underoos On]Please scroll to the top of this page. Now read the first word in the title of this thread. I looked up the word “poll” in my dictionary, and nowhere does the word “debate” pop up as a definition. Either this goes back to being a poll right quick, or I’m removing the word from the title and moving this thread to Great Debates.[/Moderator Underoos On]