Posted on 01/19/2006 10:06:39 AM PST by Thud
THE CASE FOR INVADING IRAN
America has come to another turning point – whether our inaction will again engulf the world and us in a nightmare comparable to World War Two. This will entail loss of our freedom as the price of domestic security measures against terrorist weapons of mass destruction, though we might suffer nuclear attack before implementing those measures. The only effective alternative is American use of pre-emptive military force against an imminent threat – Iranian nuclear weapons, which requires that we invade Iran and overthrow its mullah regime as we did to Iraq’s Baathist regime.
All the reasons for invading Iraq apply doubly to Iran, and with far greater urgency. Iran right now poses the imminent threat to America which Iraq did not in 2003. Iran may already have some nuclear weapons, purchased from North Korea or made with materials acquired from North Korea, which would increase its threat to us from imminent to direct and immediate.
Iran’s mullahs are about to produce their first home-built nuclear weapons this year. If we permit that, many other countries, some of whose governments are dangerously unstable, will build their own nuclear weapons to deter Iran and each other from nuclear attack as our inaction will have demonstrated our unwillingness to keep the peace. This rapid and widespread proliferation will inevitably lead to use of nuclear weapons in anger, both by terrorists and by fearful and unstable third world regimes, at which point the existing world order will break down and we will suffer every Hobbesian nightmare of nuclear proliferation.
Iran has dramatically shortened the time required to acquire the necessary weapons-grade fissionable materials by purchase abroad of pre-enriched, but not yet weapons-grade, fissionable materials (not just from North Korea). Iran’s technicians already have the expertise to fabricate functional nuclear weapons. The latter opinion is held by, among others, Mohamed El Baradei, director-general of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, who said that Iran can produce nuclear weapons in a few months if it has the requisite weapons-grade fissionables: "And if they have the nuclear material and they have a parallel weaponization program along the way, they are really not very far—a few months—from a weapon."
It normally takes years to produce the highly purified fissionables required for nuclear weapons – that is the only obstacle after Pakistan let its nuclear weapons program director sell the knowledge of weapons fabrication to anyone with enough money. All estimates alleging that it will take Iran years to produce nuclear weapons assume that they will do so from scratch, but that is not the case. Iran purchased pre-enriched fissionables with the intent of “breaking out” in a short period to a fully stocked production “pipeline” of fissionables under enrichment at all stages of the process, from “yellowcake” at the low end to almost ready at the high end.
It is possible, and in my opinion has already happened, that Iran has purchased enough nuclear materials from North Korea to fabricate a few nuclear weapons and facilitate the following strategy. Iran could minimize the duration of a “window” of vulnerability to pre-emptive American or Israeli attack between their first nuclear tests (or announcement that they have nuclear weapons), and possession of enough nukes to deter attack, by postponing the announcement and/or first tests until they have a full-speed production line going – everything from enriching fissionables to weapons-grade and fabricating those into nuclear weapons, to stocks of finished nuclear weapons. At that point most or all of the latter will likely be of North Korean origin, but those will be quickly outnumbered by made-in-Iran ones under final assembly at the time of the announcement. I believe this is the plan Iran is following, and that the announcement will come late this year.
The recent spike in world oil prices gave Iran’s mullahs billions of dollars more in hard currency for use in acquiring material for their nuclear weapons program. The timing of their ongoing breakout to public nuclear weapons capability, and the public threats of Iran’s president, indicate that some recent event has given them additional confidence here. I feel this was their purchase of enough nuclear weapons materials from North Korea to fabricate a few nuclear weapons. They might have bought fully operational North Korean nukes. Such North Korean complicity carries other implications.
Whatever the reason, Iran’s mullahs no longer seem to feel a need to wait for final processing of fissionables, and fabrication of those into nuclear weapons, before their nuclear deterrent against the United States is ready. They act like they presently have that deterrent, and are proceeding to backfill their fissionable processing and weapons fabrication line before announcing that they have nuclear weapons. America’s election cycle plus the Bush administration’s fictitious budget estimates might also have a role in the timing of this announcement.
Those who have considered the consequences of Iran’s open possession of nuclear weapons (as opposed to covert possession) have generally focused on its avowed threats against Israel and the United States. Those are certainly enough grounds for pre-emptive attack by both – Iran’s mullah regime is the one government in the entire world whose possession of nuclear weapons would most pose a direct and immediate threat to America and Israel.
Iran’s mullahs will use nuclear weapons as a shield against foreign attack while they more openly support terrorism elsewhere. American acquiescence in Iranian nuclear weapons will lose the war on terror by ceding terrorists a “privileged sanctuary” in Iran. We’ll have let terrorists have in Iran what we invaded Iraq to stop. The invasion of Iraq will have been a complete waste of effort, and our dead in Iraq will have died in vain.
The chief threat of Iranian nukes, however, is what they will lead to elsewhere – something which will make all of the above trivial by comparison, something which will go on and on long after Iran’s mullah regime is overthrown by the Iranian people.
If the United States does not forcibly prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons, every country in the area will know to a moral certainty that they cannot rely on the United States for protection against Iranian nuclear attack, or Iranian nuclear blackmail in support of domestic opposition to the generally shaky regimes of the Middle East. American prestige and influence there will collapse. If we won’t protect ourselves by pre-emption, we can’t be relied on to protect anyone else.
So every country within reach of Iranian nuclear weapons will have enormous strategic pressure to develop their own nuclear weapons to deter Iranian nuclear threats. As a recent strategic survey noted, Syria has many times the per capita and absolute GDP of North Korea, and Egypt several times the per capita and absolute GDP of Pakistan. If North Korea and Pakistan can develop nuclear weapons, so can Syria and Egypt, and also Saudi Arabia, all three of whose regimes are shaky. And they won’t be the only countries to develop nuclear weapons after Iran does - many more will join the nuclear “club” within a few years, some within months.
All of those countries having nuclear weapons will create a security nightmare – at some point terrorists will be able to buy or steal some (assuming that Iran doesn’t first give a few to favored terrorist groups). It is likely that at least some will use their nuclear weapons on each other, or in a domestic coup or factional fight. The latter might first happen in Iran.
Few have any idea of the degree to which international trade and prosperity relies on free movement of goods between countries. Container cargo is an ideal means of covertly transporting terrorist nuclear weapons. Once the first terrorist nuke is used, international trade will be enormously curtailed for at least several months for security reasons, and the entire world will suffer a simultaneous recession.
It won’t stop there, though. These same security precautions, once implemented, will significantly impede future economic growth – a ballpark estimate of reducing worldwide growth by 20-30% is reasonable. Consider the worldwide and domestic effects over a twenty-year period of a one-quarter across the board reduction in economic growth.
This will be just from security precautions against terrorist nukes –not physical destruction from such use nor, more importantly, the consequences of nuclear wars between or within third world states. Physical destruction from these will be bad enough, but that pales compared with the social and consequent economic effects – enormous tides of refugees, economic collapse and outright anarchy over wide areas.
We cannot avoid that washing over us from abroad even if we manage to avoid terrorist nuclear attack at home, and we are unlikely to be so lucky. Scores if not hundreds of thousands of Americans will likely be killed, and many more injured, from terrorist nuclear devices used in America when so many politically unstable countries possess hundreds of the things.
We better than most can economically afford the thoroughly intrusive security measures required to protect against terrorist nukes when the threat can come from anywhere, as opposed to Islamic extremists alone.
But the price of domestic security, when foreign security fails due to a failure of leadership and will by President Bush, will be something much more precious – our freedom.
Freedom everywhere will suffer due to those same security precautions. The greatest loss of freedom will come in those countries which are freest, i.e., especially America. Especially us.
THIS is what is really at stake – the freedom which makes us Americans.
It is obvious that Iran’s leaders cannot be deterred from developing nuclear weapons. The U.N. won’t stop them. Diplomatic solutions won’t – the mullahs’ bad faith is obvious. Their diplomacy serves the same purpose as Japan’s with us in late 1941 after their carrier attack fleet had sailed for Pearl Harbor - to distract us from the coming attack. We are at that same point now, only we know the Kido Butai is coming and have no excuse for surprise. Iran’s President has openly stated their real intentions. Iranian diplomacy merely lets the willing deceive themselves.
There isn’t time to overthrow Iran’s mullah regime through subversion before the end of this year, and President Bush’s toleration of factional disputes in our national security apparatus means that we lack the capability to do so, period.
Iran seems to be in a pre-revolutionary state such that its mullah regime will collapse from purely domestic reasons within a few years even if we do nothing, but by then it will have openly had nuclear weapons for several years, possibly used them against Israel and/or been pre-emptively nuked by Israel, and widespread nuclear proliferation will have started with all the horrors that will bring.
Only military force THIS YEAR can prevent this nightmare. Bombing alone won’t do it – it will only postpone things, and Iran’s mullahs won’t just sit there while we’re bombing them. War is a two-way street. They have spent years preparing for this conflict, and will try to stop Persian Gulf oil exports. There will also be an instant massive uprising by Iranian-led Shiite militias in southern Iraq.
Half-measures in war only make things worse. If we really want to find out how much Iran’s mullah regime can hurt us, and relearn the lessons of Vietnam, we need only bomb without invading. That will maximize our losses. Those who advocate mere bombing have not considered that Iran might already have some nuclear weapons.
Israel does not have the military capability we do. Israeli air attack against Iran’s dispersed and hardened nuclear facilities will at most postpone Iranian production by a few months. The United States Air Force can postpone it for as long as we keep up the attacks, but the mullahs will counterattack such that we’ll be at war whether we want to be or not, only with no chance of victory while we’re afraid to win.
The only effective way to stop the mullahs from building nukes, while minimizing our losses from their counter-attacks, is to overthrow their regime by invasion and conquest as we did against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.
Democratic military experts agreed in a recent Atlantic Monthly article that eliminating Iran's mullah regime with a ground invasion is feasible - they were more optimistic about it than I am (my emphasis:
"In all their variety, these and other regime-change plans he described had two factors in common. One is that they minimized "stability" efforts—everything that would happen after the capital fell. "We want to take out of this operation what has caused us problems in Iraq," Gardiner of CentCom said, referring to the postwar morass. "The idea is to give the President an option that he can execute that will involve about twenty days of buildup that will probably not be seen by the world. Thirty days of operation to regime change and taking down the nuclear system, and little or no stability operations. Our objective is to be on the outskirts of Tehran in about two weeks. The notion is we will not have a Battle of Tehran; we don't want to do that. We want to have a battle around the city. We want to bring our combat power to the vicinity of Tehran and use Special Operations to take the targets inside the capital. We have no intention of getting bogged down in stability operations in Iran afterwards. Go in quickly, change the regime, find a replacement, and get out quickly after having destroyed—rendered inoperative—the nuclear facilities."
I believe the durations mentioned in the Atlantic article should be at least doubled – it won’t take us only 7-10 more days to overthrow Iran’s regime than it did Iraq’s, not to mention locating and destroying the known and secret nuclear facilities scattered over a wide area. I feel the Atlantic panel significantly underestimated logistic problems. Our forces must pass through mountains to get to Iran’s capital of Teheran, while getting to Baghdad required passage only through deserts and broad river valleys. Iran is much bigger than Iraq, so our ground forces will have a greater distance to travel, while even minor resistance in mountain passes will cause significant delays.
The Atlantic article concluded that eliminating the mullah regime was feasible – we agree that Iranian ground resistance will be minor, especially compared to our forces’ extreme effectiveness - but the Atlantic panelists felt that the consequences had too high a price. I agree that the occupation campaign afterwards will be much worse for us, in terms of intensity and required manpower, than the occupation campaign in Iraq – they felt the necessary manpower required for several years’ occupation duty would be prohibitive. They did not, however, even attempt to weigh that against the consequences of letting Iran have nuclear weapons, the effects of it already having some, and the probable duration of an occupation campaign.
I do. The tradeoffs between the cost of an extended occupation in Iran, and its desirability, change dramatically if we must search for easily concealed, ready-to-use nuclear weapons, as opposed to merely destroying the physical ability to produce them.
I also feel the occupation campaign in Iran will take much less time than the one in Iraq for the following reasons:
(1) Iran has a functioning civil society and democratic tradition while Iraq didn't. The mullahs veto candidates they don't like, more in the past few years than earlier, but the systems and mindset for a functioning democratic society are present.
(2) We can use many of the Iranian army's junior officers, non-commissioned officers and enlisted personnel as a cadre for the new democratic regime's security forces. We couldn't do that with Iraq's army as the officers and non-coms were almost exclusively Sunni Arabs aka Baathist regime loyalists, and the mostly Shiite conscripts had almost all gone home.
3) Iran has at least one order of magnitude, and probably several orders of magnitude, less loose explosives than were present in Iraq, for possible use in improvised explosive devices. The mullah regime die-hards will die much faster than the Baathist die-hards in Iraq, because the ones in Iran will be attacking our forces mostly with direct-fire weapons. That is suicidal against American forces.
4) Language and ethnicity differences mean that Al Qaeda's purely Sunni foreign terrorists won't be able to operate much in Iran. The latter operated only briefly in Shiite areas of Iraq - those that didn't leave quickly died horribly at Shiite hands. While there are a lot of Sunnis in Iran, few of those are Arabs - they're Kurds, Azeris, etc.
My rough estimate of American casualties in the conquest and occupation campaigns for Iran, assuming that the mullahs don't nuke us, or use chemical weapons, is that we'd take about 50% more casualties in the first 18-24 months in Iran than in three years in Iraq, mostly in the twelve month period after the initial conquest.
I agree with the Atlantic panelists that the conquest campaign in Iran would, in terms of casualties, cost little more than Iraq’s - several hundred allied KIA. I just think it would take longer.
Everyone I know of with opinions on the subject agrees that the occupation campaign in Iran would be more intense than Iraq's, but Iraq's has seen only about 1700 KIA (or is it total fatalities including accidents?) during the 33 months of the occupation to date. That is about 50 fatalities per month for an average of about 120,000 troops (1 fatality per month per 2400 troops).
If Iran's occupation entails 200,000 men and is twice as intense as Iraq's in terms of casualties, we're looking at 1 fatality per 1200 men per month. 200k x 12 months = 2400k divided by 1200 = 2000 fatalities per year. This is certainly a lot compared to Iraq’s occupation campaign, but it also indicates that American casualties in Iran will be acceptable by any reasonable standard.
In my opinion the occupation campaign in Iran will be awful only for the first year, and then conditions will improve much faster than in Iraq for reasons mentioned above in this post. My guesstimate at this point is about 3000 American fatalities over two years for both the conquest and occupation campaigns in Iran, though the first year would be ghastly.
That Iran may already have some nuclear weapons (IMO this is likely) complicates a prospective invasion. We’d had a plan for several years to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons capability (i.e., the launchers as well as the warheads) – it is called variously “Global Strike” and CONPLAN 8022. The United States Air Force excels at blowing things up.
Consider also, that, if small numbers of Iranian nuclear weapons are enough of a threat to seriously menace an American invasion, they are enough of a threat to merit pre-emptive attack with American nuclear weapons. Get real - our nukes are bigger than theirs, and we have lots more than they do. And if Iranian nuclear weapons aren’t enough of a threat to merit pre-emptive use of our own, they’re not a reason to avoid invading. It is not likely, however, that the USAF will need nuclear weapons to keep the mullahs from getting any off.
Did I mention the bribes? Now is the time for some breathtaking bribes – say a billion dollars per Iranian nuke delivered to us, which would be cheap given the alternative. Once we demonstrate the will to invade and eliminate the mullah regime, such bribes would be more effective than most think. Psychological warfare was wildly successful in the invasion of Iraq.
Fear of possible Iranian nuclear weapons use against an American invasion is not a valid reason for doing nothing. A thousand more American civilians have been killed by enemy action at home in this war than American servicemen killed at home and abroad. Not invading Iran will increase this disparity by several orders of magnitude. We have armed forces to protect our civilians from the enemy, not vice versa – soldiers die so civilians don’t. We will invade Iran to protect the American people from nuclear attack. That is worth the risk posed by Iranian nuclear weapons to American soldiers, and the burden of deploying 200,000 troops there for several years. Our reserves knew when they enlisted that they’d be called up for the duration of a major war. Invasion of Iran to protect America from nuclear attack, and preserve our freedom, counts as a major war.
This would, however, make absolute hash of the Bush administration's quite fictitious future budget estimates, which are the reason why it refused to significantly expand our ground forces after 9/11 though such was obviously necessary. Those phony budget estimates are arguably the biggest obstacle to our invasion of Iran this year. Iran’s mullahs might even have counted on this in timing their breakout to public nuclear weapons possession.
And if we don't invade this year, it won't matter much after that. We'll be in the worst case scenario. And President Bush will be reviled as America’s worst President – the one who through inaction cost us our freedom.
I agree that the Iranian regime should not be allowed to obtain nukes, but is an invasion the way to go? Iran is a large mountainous country. There doesn't seem to be any easy way to invade Iran. Also, a full-fledged invasion might unite the population against us. I would think an invasion would be an absolute last resort.
Your statements are a contradiction. You can't do one without the other.
It is the absolute last resort, and that is where we are.
Folks a whole lot smarter than myself have always said that this is a screwy name for a war, with which I agree. War on Terror is a tactic, not an enemy. The ENEMY is Islam. They keep telling us that they are going to destroy us and we keep making excuses for these barbarians. PC is going to destroy us, aided by Islam.
Don't be a dolt...with Schrillary as president we can pretty much count on the USA being but a mere memory. She won't have the support from the leftist wacko's and we know who's side they're on.
Iran's nuclear program is as much for domestic security as it is for offense/defense.
[And if we don't invade this year, it won't matter much after that. We'll be in the worst case scenario. And President Bush will be reviled as America’s worst President – the one who through inaction cost us our freedom.]
I've been saying this since 9-11. Major hints have been dropped all along that the Sunni Al Qaeda leaders are being harbored by Iran, which though Shiite, agreed with Al Qaeda about eliminating the current socalled "pro-American" regimes.
I initially thought this Iran regime change was scheduled by Rumsfeld for 2003, with Iraq scheduled for 2002.
Here are some theories I have:
1) I've long said that President Bush seems to be prolonging the war (by not attacking Iran) in order to keep the Republicans in power (based on the principle that the most left wing government in British history was elected by a seemingly ungrateful public when Churchill actually achieved victory over the Nazis, removing the reason to fight the right with the right). My impression has been that, when we allow Iran to remain an enemy, American South Park Conservatives will be forced to park their rumps firmly in the Republican camp for the rest of their lives...never being able to negotiate on other issues because the liberals would always remain crazy.
2) Based on my contention that the primary reason for the Iraq War was to give the Sunni Muslims a more dire enemy than the USA (the Shiites), I have also assumed that the reason Bush has allowed a threatening Iran to remain in power after 9-11 is to magnify the Shiite threat to Sunnis.
The Shiites now control over 2/3 of the Middle East and the Shiite Iraqi Army is getting better and better every day. Soon it will be able to retake Mekka for Shiite Islam. That would be Al Qaeda's worst nightmare (more than if the USA nuked Mekka).
My problem with this theory is that, 3 years after checkmating the Sunnis by liberating Iraq...too many Sunnis still do not "get it" that they will need to become best friends with the USA in order to get the USA to protect the Sunnis from the Shiites that we put in power. It would be like the German Nazis continuing their Werewolf insurgency even after the Berlin Airlift in 1948! In fact, the government of Shiite Iran has been PAYING the Sunni insurgency to keep killing US soldiers (an act of war) because, under this theory, the Iranian government believes someone in the Bush administration is overly enamored of this concept of "let's force the Sunnis to be friends with us again before we deal with the Iranian threat."
Imagine if the Soviet Union paid the Nazi insurgency to continue killing US soldiers in 1947 so the Germans wouldn't finally unite with the USA against the Soviets. That is what is happening today in the Middle East.
Instead of waiting for Sunni leaders to finally start indoctrinating their publics to finally see the danger of a nuclear powered Shiite Iran, I would recommend that we blackmail the Sunnis leaders into doing that now and offering to send troops into Iran as well. The refusal of the Saudi Royal Family to do this could cause them to be considered a target if Iran uses already existing nukes on us or American civilians in the battle. I am very concerned that the top Al Qaeda leadership is residing in Iran and that a significant of the Saudi Royal Family is backing them.
3) Another theory is that we have never been able to invade Iran since 9-11 because we even had credible evidence back then that terrorists already had a nuke emplaced in at least one American city...or that Paris or Moscow were under such a threat...and that this threat to Paris or Moscow was responsible for these "allies" having had to pretend that they were agains the liberation of Iraq.
If this is the scenario...I can see why the Bush administration would hope to just try to foment a revolution in Iran...but if this is done while more and more nukes are infiltrated into the USA and European cities...then this is a truly nightmare scenario.
Theory #4 is that too many Republicans aren't behind the 7 or 8 regime changes that Bush announced in September 2001 would have to occur in this war. Like the Democrats, these people seem to be waiting for another 9-11 before they will finally get on board for what 9-11 made clear needed to be done.
Unfortunately, I believe theory #3 is what is going on. Chirac's statement today only makes me more concerned that Paris is under a horrible nuclear threat right now. Why else would he so vehemently announce TODAY that he is prepared to wipe out places like Pakistan and Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia (who else could he have been talking about)?
What suddenly crawled up Chirac's trousers?
In all of this is the underlying thing.....Sunni, Shiite, Taliban, Whahabi's...they're all Muslims. Until we declare Islam illegal and deal with it as the cult of death that it really is then all of this talk is just more "tilting at windmills".
" I fear that we will be in an awkward place "
then we shouldn't leave anyone to be in an awkward place with
[2. The job isn't finished in Iraq or Afghanistan, and Al queda isn't destroyed yet.]
FReepers will clearly be our own worse enemies if this is common viewpoint on FR. This is the kind of thing they are saying at DU right now (no insult meant, it is just a fact). It reminds me about something else: that I am 95% sure that, if a President Gore liberated Iraq, FR would be hostile territory for me because supporters of OIF would be zotted as trolls. The old isolationism can't be gotten rid of even after 9-11 and the Jacksonian response it required.
What if Bush knew shortly after 9-11 that Iran harbors Al Qaeda? What if CIA director Porter Goss announces tomorrow that Osama is in Iran? Are you not going to believe Bush and Rumsfeld if they say that Osama and the Al Qaeda leadership are in Iran? Still OK to just leave them there? 9-11 anyone?
I thought FReepers were over 83% in agreement that the Iraq War has, so far, been keeping Al Qaeda busy with their hope that a government would never form in Iraq. This theory's backside is that, when Al Qaeda gives up on fighting us in Iraq...they will turn to their 9-11 plans...unless we wipe out their homebase...which may well be Iran (I hope it is Iran because Pakistan would be a nightmare to confront if they are secretly still at war with us).
If 80% of Iranians are pro-American...we can actually get LESS involved in the Middle East if the two Shiite states, Iran and Iraq, are powerful American allies.
If Iranian and Iraqi oil is being sold to the USA by intensely pro-American regimes...the Saudi Royal Family will then be forced to slaughter the anti-American members of that family and Al Jazeera will have to mellow out.
[I would think an invasion would be an absolute last resort]
We are, of course, talking about supporting a revolution and the use of Muslim volunteers in large numbers. I won't go into possible scenarios because "loose lips, even when hypothesizing, can sink ships" but, if there has been no planning on that end, then Rummy is incompetent.
You have to plan for every scenario. Since 80% of Iranians are pro-American...we would have to be ready now ANYWAY with a Muslim force to help us liberate Iran should another 9-11 occur.
Nobody can be serious about the idea that we would leave Iran's regime standing if another 9-11 happened?
Bush would love to take out the Iranian regime. The thing stopping him is the international left and our home grown Dems and their relentless defeatism and isolationism. That is potent enough politically that he does not think he can afford direct Iranian action, if he can avoid it.
The international left called for EU-led diplomacy, so he let the EU have the lead on the matter. He was giving them rope, certainly. His way of clearing the irresponsible opposition is to give them responsibility and make it clear to everyone they have nothing to offer.
Chirac is simply preparing the French public for his acceptance of Iranian nuclear weapons. He intends to support Russian stall tactics, to avoid any referral of Iran to the UN and any meaningful sanctions, let alone actual military action. Since this means Iran will get nukes and France will have helped them do so, this opens Chirac up to charges of world-historical irresponsibility and utter lack of any coherent policy on Islamic terrorism and proliferation.
His attempt at a policy is the fall-back one of deterrence. Since he can't stop Iran from getting nukes, he wants to make clear France's policy is to respond to nuke terrorism with its own nukes, if and when France itself is ever hit with them. This means if anybody else is hit by terrorist nukes, France will sit on its ass. And if terrorists are merely getting the ability to hit people with nukes, France will sit on its ass and encourage everyone else to do likewise, and also collect large bribes.
The policy will blow up in their face as soon as several terrorist states have crossed the proliferation barrier. Because then, they won't have any idea what the return address for their retaliation, is supposed to be. But Chirac doesn't care about that, he figures he will be dead by then anyway. And maybe the US will stop things in the meantime, or that shitty little country will (hopefully getting itself nuked in the process, perhaps).
The important thing is to get the embarassment of being humiliated by Iran's outright defiance off the front page. And to do so without crawling to the Americans and admitting their were right, which would be at least as humiliating. Avoiding humiliation without actually getting off their ass, is of course the lodestar of French policy in all things.
Is there a Cliff's Notes or a Reader's Digest condensed version of this article?
Later read bump.
[But we want to remain involved in the Muslim world, not just for ten or twenty years but indefinitely.]
Of course. I am starting to have a problem with seeing too many leftist concepts getting dredged on this issue by FReepers:
1) We supposedly have "too much on our plate" in Iraq and Afganistan. Classical leftist argument at DU. Ignores COMPLETELY the fact that Iran is committing acts of war everyday by funding the killing of US soldiers that are giving us, in Iran's hardliner interest, "too much on our plate." If we don't liberate Iran, the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue as a matter of course.
2) The argument that another Cold War would be better than a quick hot war...is bad because the last Cold War brought us Vietnam, Korea, El Salvador. Let them have nukes and then they, and our left wing, will only get louder and more obnoxious and dangerous.
Do you honestly think that it will not take 2 seconds for liberals in the USA to switch from "there is no proof that they have nukes" or "we have too much on our plate" to "don't attack because we will all die if we do. Don't even make them angry! Give them this country and that country. Do what they say!"
People have forgotten the coziness of fidel and tehran. Or hugo and tehran.
[Bush would love to take out the Iranian regime. The thing stopping him is the international left and our home grown Dems and their relentless defeatism and isolationism.]
My take is that it is the isolationist FReeper contingent that is stopping him.
Conservative Europeans are with us on this, but this time around we have to get creative. We must clearly have tens of thousands of Muslim fighters seen invading. Even if they are invading sectors that are not important (only the oil fields are important...and maybe Tehran).
We will need to give the Saudi Royal Family an offer they cannot refuse: Saudi Army participation in an attack or we support the Iraqi Army 2 years from now in taking Mekka after we liberate Iran ourselves.
One must understand that we actually allowed Saudi Arabia to not be onboard with the Iraq Liberation.
We could have told the Royals that we would f$*k them if they did not send the Saudi Army in to put down the Sunni insurgency. But we correctly saw the complications in having Saudis involved in Iraq. No such complications or excuses exist for Iran!
A big wildcard here is Venezuela and their open threats to cut off oil to the USA if an Iran invasion happens.
And we are still horribly weakened by our liberals who have been blocking the Alaska drilling for a generation.
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