Posted on 11/19/2005 5:00:05 AM PST by FerdieMurphy
THEY WERE not hard to spot the dead tanks as they littered the sides of the main Baghdad-Tehran highway deep inside Iran. Heavy twisted monsters, blasted by artillery, mounted on stone plinths like trophies as a warning to any other army that came to fight and die here, as Saddams divisions had done. After 40 I stopped counting.
On the Iranian border itself the little town of Mehran had become a shrine to martyrdom and death. Like a mini-Stalingrad, it had been razed three times during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, its streets filled with the corpses of Iranian child soldiers sacrificed in human-wave assaults; but in the end the Iranians expelled the invader at an awesome human cost.
Saddam has gone, but Mehran is once more in the front line of potential war. The Iran-Iraq border is just a few miles to the west of the town on a flat plain ideal tank country. The border itself is marked by a meandering stream but on either side now are the opposing armies of the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, all waiting for orders from above. If the Americans do ever invade then it will be here, as the shortest distance to Tehran from Baghdad; and that little stream the Rubicon for a war of unimaginable consequences.
In No10 the tom-toms of war of war are drumming again as Tony Blair warns that he will not tolerate the meddling hand of Iran in the affairs of Iraq. In Washington the neoconservative tom-toms are even louder, warning that the West must surgically strike at Irans hidden nuclear facilities and robustly challenge Iranian state-sponsored terrorism. Nor it seems can the EU countenance Irans rise as a nuclear power either. A new nuclear crisis now looms later this month with the threat of UN Security Council sanctions over Irans controversial nuclear programme.
In Tehran the hardline President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has done little for foreign relations with his chilling call for Israel to be wiped off the map. We are, it seems, close to the on-ramp for another spectacular confrontation in the Middle East.
But before we succumb again to the hysterical warnings of our leaders it is worth seeking a cold-eyed measure of this new enemy they would have us fight. Iraq and Iran are very different. Iran is nearly four times the size of its neighbour and six times the size of Britain. How could an already undermanned American army expect to control such a huge territory?
Nor will those already fabled surgical strikes by the US Air Force deliver a decisive blow to Irans growing nuclear capability. Irans nuclear plants are already well hidden across its huge land mass. And all that a partial strike will do is unleash an unstoppable war without significantly damaging the enemys capability.
Irans population at 70 million is three times that of Iraqs and it has one of the youngest populations in the world. Irans standing army is estimated by the CIA to be 520,000-strong, but each year 817,000 17-year-old Iranian boys are potentially available for military service. That is an awful lot of martyrs or suicide bombers.
The Iranians are Persians, not Arabs, a consideration entirely absent from most neoconservative analyses of Irans supposed weakness. Persian imperial dynasties date back to Cyrus the Great, around 530BC, and Xerxes, 486-465BC, who plagued the Greeks.Unlike the chaotic Arab shambles of Saddams Iraq, Iran remains a hierarchical society where the vast majority live in rigid terror of the authorities above them, religious or imperial, and will utterly obey their commands.
In many ways Ayatollah Khomeini, who came to power in 1979, was the greatest Persian Emperor, fusing his own version of Shia Islam into a state ideology. And during the Iran-Iraq war he revived the ancient Shia tradition of martyrdom: hundreds of thousands of soldiers, many of them children, died in futile suicidal assaults over minefields. The Tree of Islam has to be watered with the blood of martyrs, said Khomeini without regret.
Martyrdom is still the state religion. Huge posters of the war dead and Palestinian and Lebanese suicide bombers dominate every surface in Tehran and every speech of the political leadership. Any attempt to threaten or invade Iran will be a huge asset to a regime longing to re-energise its faded legitimacy among its own downtrodden population. Invasion by the Great Satan would be a godsend.
Nor should we underestimate Irans capacity to punish its enemies at long range. In 1982 Iran sent a thousand revolutionary guards to Lebanon to spread the Islamic revolution. The plan failed but Iran was behind three of the greatest acts of postwar terrorism: the American Embassy bombing in Beirut and the blowing up of the US Marine and French paratrooper barracks by suicide bombers in 1983. The French and the Americans left Lebanon in defeat soon afterwards.
Iraq is a mess but widening the conflict by attacking Iran would be an act of madness. That little stream on the western edge of Mehran is a Rubicon we must never cross.
note to self: aways stay upwind of factory/farm/lab...better yet, stay out of that state. :D
You really need to read a bit more history before you opine.
Think of Japan in August, 1945. Once it was obvious that we were serious and their position hopeless, resistance evaporated. Not instantly, but quickly.
I looked into it a little more and it seems to be not very open and shut on whether the Christians were responsible or not. I got the story from Carl Sagan who is not exactly an unbiased source. As to the Caliphate --
http://www.bede.org.uk/library.htm
>The errors in the sources are obvious and the story itself is almost wholly incredible. In the first place, Gregory Bar Hebræus represents the Christian in his story as being one John of Byzantium and that John was certainly dead by the time of the Moslem invasion of Egypt. Also, the prospect of the library taking six months to burn is simply fantastic and just the sort of exaggeration one might expect to find in Arab legends such as the Arabian Nights. However Alfred Butler's famous observation that the books of the library were made of vellum which does not burn is not true. The very late dates of the source material are also suspect as there is no hint of this atrocity in any early literature - even in the Coptic Christian chronicle of John of Nikiou (died after 640AD) who detailed the Arab invasion. Finally, the story comes from the hand of a Christian intellectual who would have been more than happy to show the religion of his rulers in a bad light. Agreeing with Gibbon this time, we can dismiss it as a legend.
Now go do that for the enormous amount of foolishness you have spewed today and you will have begun to process of actually learning something.
BTW it is best if you actually read the source documents rather then the opinion of those sitting around blabbering a thousand years later.
Inconvenient facts are not welcome here, stick to accepted doctrine! ;)
Exodus 32:27 (King James Version) King James Version (KJV) Public Domain 27And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour
While it may be true that not all Muslims are directly engaged in killing or slavery, the lack of condemnation of such coming from the overwhelming majority of Muslims is noticeably lacking. In this case, the failure to speak against such activities amounts to support.
I agree. I just don't see how calling Muhammed a pervert will help them to see the error of their ways.
Your point is incongruous with history. Regardless of whether it is today or thousands of years ago, Christians who rigorously follow the tenants of the New Testament were never less than better behaved.
Since I am neither Christian nor Muslim scholar, I let actions speak louder than words. I have also witnessed some of the most biggoted and hateful speech from those who call themselves Christian, unfortunately.
As I have noted before, the same cannot be said of the followers of Islam rigorously following the Koran.
I am not a scholar of Islam and am not competent to agree or disagree.
I disagree vehemently. I challenge you to name a major nationalist movement (excluding any involving Muslims) that has employed suicide bombers to the vast extent that Islamist fascists have done.
I thought the Kamikazee example was good enough, but I'm not sure what the point is. They employ suicide bombers since it's effective. Irish nationalist Catholics did not do suicide, so what? They killed just as well. Obviously it's more in line with Islamic teachings.
Let me extend the challenge to cite any modern nationalist movement that has used fatwahs or religious edits to justify killing innocent non-combatants in attacks on targets with no military or political value.
Again, so what? It's their cultural/religious heritage naturally. Call it "culturalism" or "ethnicism" instead of nationalism. They are Islamic but I believe their culture is a failure (which probably can be directly linked to Islam), but I think their hatred is fueled by resentment over their failure, not by the Koran. That's only my opinion. Actually I think that blaming the Koran removes some of the blame from themselves.
Who knows?... Who knows?...
I hadn't realized that the death of islam was still in question.
The problem, as I see it, is that Islam is, at its very core, a religion that is antithetical to almost all the values that almost all other religions and, frankly ethical people generally, hold dear. How can almost pure evil reform itself into good? It's analogous to expect Marxism, Leninism, or Stalinism to transform itself into something decent, humane, and loving.
Read THE PROPHET OF DOOM (a book filled with copious quotations from the Quran and Hadith) which reveals the incredibly corrupt, violent, and self-serving nature of Muhammad, and after you do I think you'll change your mind. There's no saving a tree that is as sick as Islam.
Christians is Nazi Germany.
This quote:
"The Iranians are Persians, not Arabs, a consideration entirely absent from most neoconservative analyses of Irans supposed weakness. Persian imperial dynasties date back to Cyrus the Great, around 530BC, and Xerxes, 486-465BC, who plagued the Greeks."
reminded me of the heroic battle of the Greeks against the Muslim hordes in 480BC at Thermopylae:
"In 480 B.C. the forces of the Persian Empire under King Xerxes, numbering according to Herodotus two million men, bridged the Hellespont and marched in their myriads to invade and enslave Greece.
"In a desperate delaying action, a picked force of three hundred Spartans was dispatched to the pass of Thermopylae, where the confines between mountains and sea were so narrow that the Persian multitudes and their cavalry would be at least partially neutralized. Here, it was hoped, an elite force willing to sacrifice their lives could keep back, at least for a few days, the invading millions.
"Three hundred Spartans and their allies held off the invaders for seven days, until, their weapons smashed and broken from the slaughter, they fought 'with bare hands and teeth' (as recorded by Herodotus) before being at last overwhelmed.
"The Spartans and their Thespian allies died to the last man, but the standard of valor they set by their sacrifice inspired the Greeks to rally and, in that fall and spring, defeat the Persians at Salamis and Plataea and preserve the beginnings of Western democracy and freedom from perishing in the cradle.
"Two memorials remain today at Thermopylae. Upon the modern one, called the Leonidas Monument in honor of the Spartan king who fell there, is engraved his response to Xerxes' demand that the Spartans lay down their arms. Leonidas' reply was two words, Molon labe:
" 'Come and get them.' "
from: http://www.handloads.com/articles/molonlabe.htm
Maybe the Americans don't know where the plants are, but does this writer truly believe that Mossad doesn't know?
There were Muslim hordes a thousand years before Muhammed?
Christianity, as Islam or Judaism, is judged on how its adherents act on the teachings of the religion. There has been evil done 'in the name of Christianity'. That doesn't make Christianity bad, because those actions were the opposite of what the teachings of Christianity are.
I cannot say the same about Islam, because I've never studied it, but from what I've seen of the writings, and the opinions of those who teach its followers, I am greatly concerned because the actions of its more seemingly radical adherents toward others seem to be FOLLOWING the teachings.
My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech on 12 April 1922
This is just evidence of Hitler's evil brilliance in pulling the wool over people's eyes. He may have even actually believed these words - assuming they are accurately attributed to him - back in 1922.
I've heard that all but two of the prominent Nazis who fled to the Arab world after WWII converted to Islam. Of course, from one barbaric, totalitarian faith to another is not necessarily a large leap.
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