Posted on 05/14/2006 9:00:55 PM PDT by familyop
No amount of negotiation or international pressure will persuade the Iranian theocrats to give up their longtime quest for nuclear bombs. To ensure Iran will not produce--or use--nuclear bombs, the United States and its allies must destroy Iran's nuclear facilities and wipe out its regime--and must do so without delay.
Iran presents a much greater danger to the United States' security than did Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Once Iran gets hold of nuclear bombs, the United States will be an easy target for blackmail and a likely target for mass destruction. As one of the principal ideological sources of Islamist totalitarianism, Iran is an avowed enemy of the United States and a leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Iran finances, trains, shelters and equips terrorists from organizations like al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. Iran is currently waging a proxy war against the United States in Iraq and killing American soldiers by the dozens (if not by the hundreds). Under those circumstances the United States has a moral right--indeed, a moral obligation--to defend its people from Iran's threats and preempt future terrorist attacks.
The Iranian regime has repeatedly threatened to use its soon-to-be-produced nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the map. It has repeatedly called for "Death to America." These threats must be taken seriously. We did not take Osama bin Laden's threats seriously, and lost thousands of lives in the Twin Towers. We do not want to make the same mistake with Iran, and lose many thousands more.
David Holcberg is a media research specialist at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes the ideas of Ayn Rand--best-selling author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" and originator of the philosophy she called "Objectivism.""
When I think about losing my son, who is in Japan teaching right now, it makes me real shaky.
Bless you and thank you . These are hard times and may the Lord keep and comfort you.
Thank you for contining to support our troops.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20CH20060103&articleId=1714
Exerpt:
The launching of an outright war using nuclear warheads against Iran is now in the final planning stages.
Coalition partners, which include the US, Israel and Turkey are in "an advanced stage of readiness".
Various military exercises have been conducted, starting in early 2005. In turn, the Iranian Armed Forces have also conducted large scale military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf in December in anticipation of a US sponsored attack.
Since early 2005, there has been intense shuttle diplomacy between Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara and NATO headquarters in Brussels.
In recent developments, CIA Director Porter Goss on a mission to Ankara, requested Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan "to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets." Goss reportedly asked " for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation." (DDP, 30 December 2005).
In turn, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given the green light to the Israeli Armed Forces to launch the attacks by the end of March:
All top Israeli officials have pronounced the end of March, 2006, as the deadline for launching a military assault on Iran.... The end of March date also coincides with the IAEA report to the UN on Iran's nuclear energy program. Israeli policymakers believe that their threats may influence the report, or at least force the kind of ambiguities, which can be exploited by its overseas supporters to promote Security Council sanctions or justify Israeli military action.
(James Petras, Israel's War Deadline: Iran in the Crosshairs, Global Research, December 2005)
The US sponsored military plan has been endorsed by NATO, although it is unclear, at this stage, as to the nature of NATO's involvement in the planned aerial attacks.
"Shock and Awe"
The various components of the military operation are firmly under US Command, coordinated by the Pentagon and US Strategic Command Headquarters (USSTRATCOM) at the Offutt Air Force base in Nebraska.
The actions announced by Israel would be carried out in close coordination with the Pentagon. The command structure of the operation is centralized and ultimately Washington will decide when to launch the military operation.
US military sources have confirmed that an aerial attack on Iran would involve a large scale deployment comparable to the US "shock and awe" bombing raids on Iraq in March 2003:
American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear center in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq. Using the full force of operational B-2 stealth bombers, staging from Diego Garcia or flying direct from the United States, possibly supplemented by F-117 stealth fighters staging from al Udeid in Qatar or some other location in theater, the two-dozen suspect nuclear sites would be targeted.
Military planners could tailor their target list to reflect the preferences of the Administration by having limited air strikes that would target only the most crucial facilities ... or the United States could opt for a far more comprehensive set of strikes against a comprehensive range of WMD related targets, as well as conventional and unconventional forces that might be used to counterattack against US forces in Iraq
(See Globalsecurity.org at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-strikes.htm
In November, US Strategic Command conducted a major exercise of a "global strike plan" entitled "Global Lightening". The latter involved a simulated attack using both conventional and nuclear weapons against a "fictitious enemy".
Following the "Global Lightening" exercise, US Strategic Command declared an advanced state of readiness (See our analysis below)
While Asian press reports stated that the "fictitious enemy" in the Global Lightening exercise was North Korea, the timing of the exercises, suggests that they were conducted in anticipation of a planned attack on Iran.
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Didn't we shoot Tojo's plane down during WW2??
no , Tojo was hanged
Yamamoto was air ambushed.
It was a very effective technique to rid
ourselves of a most formidable enemy .
And he wasn't even threatening the world
with nuclear assault.
We almost have to go nuclear on the facilities themselves. Only way to assure their complete destruction...
Conventional air campaign over other targets to soften the regime and destroy their ability to maintain power...
send in special forces to decapitate the regime.
If the Iranians use these against the US Navy to try and close the Gulf of Hormuz by making it a radioactive fallout zone, (and the Iraniac is acting like he wants his bluff called),then there is a tactical plan in place which would be implimentented within the hour of such an event.
Like you I do not wish to see any nuclear explosions, but the US has 500 kiloton devices prepared and ready ( about 1/3 the size of those used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) which will explode underground at the designated target sites in Iran , so as to minimize fallout. If the prevailing winds are from West to East, the down wind nations of Pakistan and India would certainly not be very happy campers, not to mention Southeast Asia.
"Soon to be produced"?
Latest CIA assessment says they are still several years away.
Something there is not accurate. Hiroshima (Little Boy) was around 15 kilotons, and Nagasaki (Fat Man) was around 20 kilotons. A 500 kiloton device is pretty damn big.
Do you perhaps mean "5 kiloton", or was the "500" the number of devices rather than the yield of them?
Our first major blunder of the Iraq war was in not taking more time to plan our moves and build a political consensus, no reason to go off half-cocked and make the same mistake twice.
Iran needs to get hit and hit hard but I don't think the U.S. or Israel has the guts to do it.
Israel is giving away land it controls trying to buy peace which is plan stupid and the U.S. has lost its will too.
As for the Munich agreement, when it was made there were valid reasons at the time.
At the time there was not much support for war with Germany in both France and Great Britain. There are many reasons for this.
The horrors of the First World War were still very fresh in both populations’ minds. But there were other less known factors.
Many people in Great Britain at the time including many leading statesmen thought the treaty of Versailles was unfair to Germany. So they did not take a stand when Germany decided to tear it up. Part of this was they could not see a real objection to why the Germanic people could not unite under one German nation. This included the Rhineland, Austria and finally the Sudetenland.
It was when Germany annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia, after encouraging the Slovaks under Tiso to breakaway that they really woke up to the dangers of Hitler and Nazism, for the first time he brought a non-Germanic population under his control. This was the reason why France and Great Britain created a treaty with Poland, and tried to create a treaty with the Soviet Union, too late.
The problem was pre Czech occupation; many in very important positions still viewed Stalin’s Russia as the main threat to Europe, and that Hitler a committed anti Bolshevik as an important bulwark. In the British establishment it was viewed as the height of folly to go to war with Hitler. They saw a rerun of the First World War, which would; who ever won would lead to more Bolshevik revolutions in Europe. In fact what was feared did come to pass war with Hitler led to the Communist occupation of Eastern Europe for over 40 years
There was a real scare of the Red Menace at the time.
Just as the Right Wing German establishment thought they could use Hitler to contain and deal with the Red Menace , so did the Establishments in Great Britain and France.
Only a few dissenters such as Winston Churchill saw this as folly.
Also at this time Britain was experiencing unrest in her empire Palestine, nationalist movement in Egypt and India, a growing Japanese menace.
They reasoned a European war would lead to diversion of military resources needed to safe guard the Empire.
That tactic will not work, since they will regroup and you will have to go in again and again and again.
And each time they will learn from past mistakes and adapt and evolve.
Rather like in Vietnam, when American forces had to go in to the same territory over and over again to destroy the NVA and VC infrastructure.
If you destroy a infrastructure you have to replace it with another or a unfriendly one will grow back in its place.
After all if what you say is true for Iran it should be true for Iraq, since we have removed there WMD and WMC programme.
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