Anyone care to explain who is going to pay the bill for your war dreams?
The US is already on the begging tour to get some funds for their “reconstruction” in Iraq (read: very unprofessional so called attempts try to repair a bit what they have destroyed in order to get the oil flowing in order to let the Iraqis pay for it themselves).
So, dearest war-lovers, can you tell me how much of your tax dollars you want to spend and how many more jobs you want to see go up in smoke in the USA, in order to get the glorious realisation of your arrogant and sadistic dreams of ever lasting war against sovereign nations and ever lasting butchering of innocent babies, children, women, unborn babies, men… and all that lives where your expensive bombs drop.
Thank you.
Salaam. A
spoke-, your well-reasoned approach is not welcome here.
Just kidding.
I think the general idea is that an attack on America will have the American people demanding a reprisal. So far, Bush’s response to asymmetric warfare has been to blast the hell out of whatever nation is most closely associated with the terrorists (besides Saudi Arabia), and to blast the hell out of whatever nation appears to be the easiest to drum up a case against. The bill for 9/11 stands at two regime changes and assorted change. Another attack would likely raise that price considerably.
It’s not reasonable at all, which is unsurprising because we are not dealing with a reasonable administration. But it is an absurdlypredictable administration.
(Notice that while ridiculing that thread from January of 2001, Scylla is still on the verge of picking a trifecta!)
i was watching Jawalk the other night and he asked some lady what country had the largest border with teh US. She said Texas.
Those f’rs seceded without even the courtesy of picking up the phone.
We cold nuke fort hood and have the arines come up staight through Galveston. Ive walked through the decrepit battlements and empt bunkers they have facing the ocean… psst they are empty.
And to avoid Santa Anna’s fate, if they decide to hole up in that old monastary in San Anonio again… hell we can nuke that too.
i was watching Jawalk the other night and he asked some lady what country had the largest border with teh US. She said Texas.
Those f’rs seceded without even the courtesy of picking up the phone.
We cold nuke fort hood and have the marines come up staight through Galveston. Ive walked through the decrepit battlements and empt bunkers they have facing the ocean… psst they are empty.
And to avoid Santa Anna’s fate, if they decide to hole up in that old monastary in San Anonio again… hell we can nuke that too.
If we’re talking a marines-in-uniform invasion, I go with “nowhere” for at least the next 5 years, regardless of who is elected in '04. We simply do not have the troops for it; we’re pretty much at our limit now. Anything else would involve taking forces away from Korea and Iraq and we’d be way too thin.
Moreover, it would be politically tough for Bush. Yes, he’d be in his final term anyway, but he’d have a keen interest in seeing Condi or someone else who sees the geopolitics as he does succeed him in '08. I actually think it’s at least as likely we’d see direct military action with a Dem in office, for the only-nixon-could-go-to-china reasons.
But if we’re talking abous something less than that …
It would not, however shock me if Iran had a revolution, aided or even engineered by the US using special ops, CIA, and/or airstrikes. Nor would I be surprised if some cruise missles and/or special ops found their way into Syria.
It also wouldn’t shock me if someone engineered a coup in North Korea; but no way would we invade per se. There’s just too much risk there. If things got really bad, we could overtly or covertly take out leadership targets and then stand by as China invades.
Aldebaran is back, and two posters with coincidental same names have just advocated the invasion of Texas. Please, please, invade Canada as quickly and bloodily as possible. I feel like I’m on drugs when I read all this and want the pain and confusion to end. :eek:
Seriously, though, Syria is next. The US does not have a lot of military slack as long as they have to occupy Iraq. No other country seems very enthusiastic about “keeping the peace” in Iraq (except Turkey :rolleyes: ). Any minor internal US scandal or downturn in the economy near election time will need its scapegoat, and Syria is just so damned easy. Also has strategic implications re Lebanon and Israel. Time: summer or fall of 2004.
j/k about the invasion of Canada scenario, but if you must, choose Ontario.
You must come to my country and “pacify” me at the cost of thousands of innocent lives, as an other poster said this is the way things should be done .
I insist on that. I would like to have some splinterbombs all around my house so that my children can play with them.
That will pacify them as first.
Next my wives will commit suicide out of grief. Which is very pacifying.
By that time I have surely found some rusty kalashnikov in my basements and since I’m very bad with weapons, you or some other volunteer US’er who is out on pacifying the Arabs has the chance to fire a few tons of amunition at me before I have loaded the dusty kalashnikov.
I think that shall be sufficient to pacify me.
Then you can go to the next country to go and pacify the Arabs there.
I started writing a reply; then deleted it and started again; deleted that one too; so I think I´d rather go and do something more productive, like banging my head against a brick wall.
**Attacked" in what way? No nation would be foolish enough to launch a direct attack against the US. Do you mean a terrorist attack? Do you think another terrorist attack would cause Americans to support an invasion of, say, Syria? What if it’s an al Qaida attack? Against whom (do you suppose) would we retaliate?
**
If an attack is carried out by a group with support from a nation, that nation has committed an act of war and will be treated accordingly.
Unless it’s one of Bush’s business friends.
But if it’s Syria, or Iran, or Libya? That would mean certain war. And justifiably so.
Libya? Nah. He’s too busy playing PR nice guy because he knows he’s on the list.
Iran? Nah. Not worth the hassle… they have a budding quiet revolution anyways.
So who’s that leave really? Syria and North Korea? No contest, Syria wins.
But all of this is rather dubious what if scenario stuff anyways, regardless of Bush’s words in 2001. Iraq is taking longer and costing more than was expected, and it’s been a wake up call for their lack of post regime change planning. They don’t want another factionalized Afghanistan scenario, so they’ll be content with rebuilding Iraq and smiling in a really nasty way at both Iran and Syria.
All this is based on there being no massive attack on the US of course. If that occurs then Syria is next.
In a total thread hijack titled, “The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same” or “History Repeats Itself…Kinda”, I want to link to an article I read recently… draw your own conclusions, but I found the parallels rather interesting…
"The troops returning home are worried. “We’ve lost the peace,” men tell you. “We can’t make it stick.” … “Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word “liberation.” Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis.”
Like in Iraq ? Oh wait… Iraq didn’t attack the US… except in words maybe.
I agree totally… Bush is really pushing the World Tyranny being trying to place the US in command of the “rest of the world”. So when Bush gets kicked out of office we can talk about ending terrorism seriously.
As for the “next fun and diverting attention from economics” war… my guess is none in the short or medium term. The troops are all tied up in Iraq… things there aren’t getting any better either. Bush has figured that wars aren’t vote getters enough… so he is back to the traditional vote topics of Cuba and Abortion. Sorry for your flag waving bloodlust Daisy Cutter… back to the tomahawk policies of lobbing million dollar missiles as reprisal. Getting troops into hostile countries just makes troops into good targets.
Long Term if Bush survives or steals the elections ? Possibly Syria… thou they don’t have Oil. That would be to satisfy pro-Israel gang. Iran is hard to pull off and is slowly taking care of their own clerical leaders. North Korea is too dangerous too… This means no convenient ME targets full of oil. Poor Syrians therefore.
G. Bush JUNIOR is planning an attack on more innocent women and children and he will do so in the name of peace. The saddest part of the entire exercise is that many Americans actually believe Junior.
G. Bush JUNIOR is planning an attack on more innocent women and children and he will do so in the name of peace. The saddest part of the entire exercise is that many Americans actually believe Junior. But as you know a majority of Germans believed Hitler.
I’d like to bump spoke-s post from some days ago back up since it really hits the point:
A lot of posts here agreed on that another invasion is only likely if there was another attack on homeland US. Now the administration is still strugling to proof that the invasion of Iraq was justified. If there was another attack, would anyone buy that bombing let’s say Syria would hit the right guys this time? Or wouldn’t anyone care because it’s an eye for an eye regardless of who is left blind in the end.
The uber-baddies of the world are described in the 2002 Patterns of Global Terrorism as “state sponsors of terrorism.”
They are (or were): Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, the Sudan, and Syria.
Certainly one facet of the amorphous “war on terrorism” focuses squarely on those countries which actively aid or tolerate terrorist activity. Therefore the above countries most likely are on someone’s “regime change” wish list.
Since the primary focus of the “war on terrorism” appears to be against Muslim-inspired extremist groups (you don’t see Americans going after ETA, IRA, Aum Shinrikyo, or the LTTE, do you?), and for other reasons which should be fairly obvious, Cuba and North Korea likely take a back seat to the others.
Two other countries made the purported American “hit list”: Lebanon and Somalia. Lebanon is essentially a client state of Syria (with lots of help from Iran); Somalia, like Lebanon, is in a state of near-anarchy and would appear to be a likely haven for terrorist organizations should the political vacuum remain in place.
Al Qaeda has successfully managed to portray itself as a “non-aligned” terrorist organization, but it is probably a minority among terrorist groups. Even if there is a proliferation of “independent” groups, terrorists–at least the more effective ones–require a safe geographical haven to conduct training and indoctrination. The American strategy appears to go after both the individuals and the nations which cannot or will not keep such organizations outside of their borders.
So yes, one possible response–in fact the most likely response, I think–to another terrorist attack will be to go after the terrorists’ training bases and the country which provided them (like Afghanistan), or use the favorable opportunity to knock off one or more of the countries which sponsor terrorism–or just piss off America (like Iraq).
Please note that I am not advocating such a response; I’m merely trying to give some modestly informed speculation on what the response is likely to be.
