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The United States has always had contingency plans for almost every eventuality. However, we have chosen NOW to go public with the existence of contingency plans for a coup in Saudi Arabia. Why now?

The following article in today's Middle East Newsline discusses this:

U.S. DISCUSSES INVASION OF SAUDI ARABIA

WASHINGTON [MENL] -- The United States has raised the prospect of a military invasion of Saudi Arabia.

The response could include the deployment of three U.S. Army divisions backed by fighter-jets and airborne early-warning and alert aircraft. In all, the U.S.-led mission could include up to 300,000 troops.

The House Armed Services Committee was briefed on the prospect of a Saudi coup and U.S. response during a hearing on Oct. 26. The scenario was outlined by Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, who cited a Saudi coup as one of several threats to the United States.

"How should the United States respond if a coup, presumably fundamentalist in nature, overthrows the royal family in Saudi Arabia?" O'Hanlon asked. "Such a result would raise the specter of major disruption to the oil economy."

I doubt that we possess the force or force structure that would allow us to intervene successfully in another middle eastern dust-up. We can't even properly staff the operations we now have on-going in Iraq without mobilizing the Guard and reserve. And, we will not have that capability unless and until a president, any president, and Congress grows the cajones to place the nation on a war footing with economic measures, reinstitute a compulsory military service and impose a tax increase to fund our operations.

The debt our current operations is generating is becoming less attractive to international financial resources every day. The Euro's acendancy as the reserve currency of the world and the concomitant decrease of that role by the dollar has the capacity to place us on the same fiscal path that saw the demise of the Soviet bear. LBJ said: "Guns and butter," and the resounding failure of that policy can be repeated easily.