Mullen: Nuclear Project Reaffirms Proliferation Dangers (AXIS OF EVIL WARNING!)

While everyone is focused on Iran, it’s important to point out that for the US to attack Syria, we could accomplish a whole lot of very useful goals:

1) The purpose would be to replace the 10% minority Alawite Shiite government with a democratic majority Sunni government. This would “re-balance the equation” in the eyes of the Sunni nations distraught from our “converting” Iraq from a Sunni to a Shiite nation. After the government was deposed, we might even get some Sunni nations to help with the rebuilding of their new democratic government.

2) It would be a three-for-one deal, as it would also neutralize Hezbollah in Lebanon, which would help stabilize that country enormously, and take a lot of wind out of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It would take a LOT of pressure off of Israel *and* Iraq as well. And it would also end a lot of the nuclear proliferation hijinks with North Korea.

3) Iran would be a big loser in the deal, as they would lose three important proxies in their fights against both Sunnis and the West. If they wanted to make mischief in the future, they would have to do it themselves, something they are loathe to do.

4) We would clean out the viper’s nest of terrorist organizations, smugglers, fugitives and assassins that make Damascus their home.

5) It would only cost a fraction of the Iraq war, and would also be over much sooner. The US forces in Iraq could take out any parts of their military that resisted in short order. Most of the clean up would be against their secret police.

Well, speak for yourself, I know what to do. Stop letting the proliferators get away with murder, the oil squeeze goons get away with mere robbery, the terrorists get away with terror, etc. It really isn't all that complicated.

Take Iran. You tell them their nuclear activities shall cease tomorrow or not one drop of oil will leave an Iranian terminal and reach any overseas destination. They won't believe you, so you seize a full supertanker, keep the oil and auction off the vessel itself, previous owners be damned. They will howl. Let them howl. Then do it again.

If they want to escalate to taking on the USN in the gulf, let them. They didn't decide to do so yesterday, so they probably don't actually relish the prospect. But if they try it, sink them all. And promise to do it again.

Or take North Korea. It has been caught out giving nukes to Syria and lying to us about it, after accepting renewed payments and concessions to "come clean", and failing to do so. So you tell them their banking allowed deal is off. Not only do they not have access to banks, but the US will observe a secondary boycott against anyone who banks with them. It is an anti counterfeiting measure, and anyone who doesn't play is a money laundering criminal and all their assets may be seized, anywhere.

Russia and China steal our software and then try to overcharge us for oil in the former case, or manage currencies in the latter case. OK fine, so the price of entry for any of their goods to the US just went up, by the total cost of all lost software sales to piracy, ever, tripled. Prorate it over their trade. If they don't want to pay it they can lose access to the US market permanently.

Oh, and until the spam flood stops, all internet and telephonic connections to them from the US are severed. Oh, and until they stop supporting terrorist regimes, we can't trust those given their passports, so none of their nationals can enter the US for any reason.

No one is willing to make the bastards pay the slightest price for their ridiculous testing behavior. Simple make them pay a price, make it steep, and the more they howl, the steeper it goes. You don't ask permission, you don't link it directly to the offense. It is simply non-specific "we don't like what you are up to", deliberate crossing retaliation.

The US has acres of soft power and plenty of the hard to back it up. But no one will use it, because we have no will, we are paralyzed PC pussycats. It is ridiculous and it is obscene, and it will end in blood and terror.

I like to point out that Iran has already been miscalculated.

From the very start of suspicions about their nuclear program, we should have assumed they had not only obtained the information they needed to construct a nuclear device, from Pakistan, but also that they had already obtained weapons grade uranium and even plutonium from North Korea.

On top of their reasonably sophisticated missile program, that would leave only obtaining parts and assembling of multiple weapons under the about 1 ton weight that could be carried by their missiles.

This would mean that their entire uranium enrichment effort has been designed from the start as a decoy both to their progress in weapons development, and to the locations of their actual nuclear weapons assembly—far away from the decoy locations. In a calculated manner, this would give them time to leisurely assemble many nuclear weapons.

Fortunately, President Bush has ordered Iran be ringed with over 300 Pac-3 anti-missiles, which should be more than capable of taking out both weapons and dummy missiles. Far beyond that number, even, assuming typical overkill failures.

Second, the Iranians are also miscalculated in two other counts. The first being that they have planned for an air attack similar to Gulf War I and II. Planned to be able to reconstruct their nuclear program after an air war, figuring that America will leave them alone for a decade after thinking it destroyed, as we left Iraq alone.

The other count is the American assumption that decapitation of their leadership would end their nuclear program. This is incorrect, because the typical Iranian on the street wants a nuclear weapons program. They see it as Aladdin’s djinn. Once they have nukes they get anything else they want. So whatever government is in power, it will probably continue to want nukes.

So, taking some mix of the above as axioms, what should a war strategy with Iran be like?

Iran is Persia, surrounded by districts of minorities: the Kurds, Arabs, Baluchs and Azeri, being the major groups. The Persians exploit them, but otherwise they are second class citizens, having more in common with adjacent peoples than Persians.

To prevent the Persians from reconstructing their nuclear weapons program after it has been reduced from the air, the US should partition Iran of some of these minority lands, which would deprive them of the resources they would need to do so. Importantly, we would not attack Persia itself, just its military and its nuclear infrastructure.

If their military was reduced, these partitioned lands could be turned over to the adjacent nations. Iranian Kurdistan to Iraqi Kurdistan, to make a “greater Kurdistan”. Arab Khuzestan, which has most of Iran’s oil wealth, would be joined with southern Iraq. And Iranian Baluchistan would be joined with Pakistani Baluchistan, depriving Iran of its mineral wealth.

This would roughly be a crescent from Iran’s northwest, South, to its southeast. It would include the Bushehr nuclear reactor on the Persian Gulf coast, and would deny Persia access to either the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Sea, which they have long used to menace shipping.

For their part, the Iranian strategy is much the same as the strategy of the Japanese prior to WWII: to kick the US out of the region, so they could dominate it. In both cases, this means to attack and destroy one or more US carriers.

For this reason, our carrier groups in the region are their primary target. Secondary targets include US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, Saudi oilfields, and the US facilities at Naples, the UAE and Bahrain.

Ironically, there is a pervasive belief throughout the Middle East that unless the US provides vast amounts of money and military hardware to Israel every year, Israel will quickly wither. In past, I was assured by a Muslim Lebanese engineer that the US spent over half its defense budget propping up Israel. He could not be persuaded otherwise, because the alternative was intolerable.

But for this reason, Iran, for its bluster, is *less* concerned about Israel than it is of driving the US out of the ME. Thus Iran is satisfied to attack Israel via its proxies.

I will also note that for at least the last six months, the US has mysteriously not deployed any of its aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf or Arabian Sea.

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