Mark Steyn: Reality check

Kerry, if elected would pull back in Iraq and turn it all over to the UN which would be ineffective. AQ and the Ba'athists would soon run the place and the Government in Pakistan would fall to the Islalmists there. Arabia probably would not last very long either. The Iranian government would gain tremendously and the Islamists would increase and spread exponentially. We would take some serious 911 type hits, in part because the domestic defenses would be negated by Kerry. He would react with bluster to the first hit and probably the second. If they are bad enough, say a nuke in a freighter in Boston Harbor or Hampton Roads, the third will get reaction. By that time the people pressure will be tremendous and the options will be much more limited. He will use nukes. Hillary will respond that way, too. Bush or another Republican might use nukes but it will be truly in extremis if all other methods have failed and we are taking heavy damage to the homeland. The problem with the Democrats is that they will let extremis come upon us without doing what is necessary to avoid such a situation.

Replacing them could be messy. However, THEY may leave us with no other choice...........and given the choice between the precious soverignty of a bunch of medieval homicidal neaderthals and our survival, I'll take us any time.

A military takeover, while probably as rapid as the Iraq campaign will never happen due to the highly symbolic nature of Mecca. Then the Arab street would REALLY get angry! No, I think the old Roman, "divide and conquer" approach would have to be used. Some sort of surrogate Saudi's who would be willing to topple the ancien regime for a piece of the pie.

The Saudi Army is fairly well equipped. But it is small. And its competence is rather questionable. And most of their equipment comes from us. Remember the problems we caused for Iraq in 91 with computer equipment with hidden backdoors and viruses? You can be sure that we have such in what we have sold to the Saudis... And to add to the picture, I have no doubt that much like the Jihadis, we have hordes of informers within the ranks.

The Saudi military just isn't a threat to us. Their wealth is. KSA fully in the Osama camp would have more then enough cash to make AQ a nuclear power...

My point was not that the Saudi military is a threat to us....the problem is that there is no 'us' there except planes. I doubt the capacity of any Arab military (my experiences were with Egyptian, Lebanese and Kuwaiti). But KSA vs. UAE, Qatar etc is no contest...and that fight could cost us dearly. A little bit of (properly trained, meaning not host country) heavy firepower (say a TF with 2 armor and 2 mech teams) could probably defend at least our key assets in country...but there ain't even that. If the jihadis take over KSA, they could use the KSA military to very quickly take the rest of the oil sheikhdoms. And we do not have forces in place for that eventuality, and KSA is very unstable.

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