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 Saddam’s 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 Iran’s hidden nuclear facilities and robustly challenge Iranian state-sponsored terrorism. Nor it seems can the EU countenance Iran’s rise as a nuclear power either. A new nuclear crisis now looms later this month with the threat of UN Security Council sanctions over Iran’s 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 Iran’s growing nuclear capability. Iran’s 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 enemy’s capability.
Iran’s population at 70 million is three times that of Iraq’s and it has one of the youngest populations in the world. Iran’s 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 Iran’s 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 Saddam’s 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 Iran’s 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.
Gee... that sounds familiar.
I know it. Sometimes a sneering question deserves a sneering answer.
Islam is built on a FOUNDATION of murder and genocide. Muhammad, the "most perfect example" was a murdering, sexually promiscuous thief and power monger. That cannot be said of Christianity. Even under intense persecution by the Roman Empire during its inception, Christianity had a relatively peaceful history UNTIL Islam began its violent assaults, including taking over Jerusalem and building a mosque and declaring as one of their most "holy" sites the very spot where the Temple of Jesus' day had stood.
Anything good about Islam is a facade. PERIOD.
Satan is clever enough to know that unveiled evil wouldn't be nearly as successful in sucking anything close to the numbers of naive souls Islam has over the past 1400 years.
So if you're waiting for Islam to "grow up", so to speak, as you imply, how long do you plan on giving it??
Your patience with the religion to mature apparently is greater than the patience many of its adherents have for realizing the lust for power Muhammad's lies tell is rightfully theirs according to their false "god".
bump
As another poster noted, history is not your thing.
Islam has, without question, cumulatively over the centuries, killed far more than any other cause, nation or religion.
A more easily statistically supported refutation of your trite claim however, although less popularized among the masses who like to think they know more about history than they actually do (probably due to the foolish infatuation many pseudo-intellectuals have with communism at the current stage of history), Stalin killed more people than "Christians is Nazi Germany". And that was contemporary with your claim.
>Stalin killed more people than "Christians is Nazi >Germany".
Yes but I was given the choice between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Stalin never claimed to be any of these.
Oh, one other thing, Iraq is NOT a mess. It is a Democracy 1/2 way to being built. That it "is a mess" is just a lie told by people completely intellectually unequipped to admit they were wrong in 1991, wrong in 2003 and WRONG now. I would think after three strikes, loser "Journalists" would be more hesitant about making such hysteric nonsical claims. I guess some "Journalists" would rather be extinct then evolve.
It would actually be refreshing if they simply TRIED FACTS seeing as how we have yet to see any from them.
Factually incorrect as well as intellectually incoherent. Sorry you are an anti religious bigot, do NOT think your emotional hysteria excuses such a completely intellectually vapid statement. Obviously the Holocaust, the Cambodia Killing Fields, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and Stalin's mass killing as well as any of a few thousand other atrocities far far far far out weight the burning of the Library in Alexandria as a crime. Also, the jury is still out over what happened. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about the event.
The Royal Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt was once the largest in the world. It is usually assumed to have been founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BC, during the reign of Ptolemy II of Egypt, after Ptolemy's father had set up the temple of the Muses—the Musaeum (whence we get museum).
The initial organization of the library, believed to have stored 400,000 to 700,000 parchment scrolls at its peak, is attributed to Demetrius Phalereus. The library was destroyed by fire, but there are a number of competing legends about when and how this happened and the truth remains unknown.
Perhaps it is time to listen more and preach Leftist Dogma a LOT less. Doubtlessly your teachers pat you on the head as "So bright" because you so effortlessly regurgitate every Leftist lie they feed you. Too bad for you reality is quite different then what the Education Establishment wants you to believe.
But you are my teachers.
Let me see if I can do better: Muslims are satanic, perverted, and without any hope of redemption short of conversion.
The spray can is the pig. Just lift its front legs and let him go... and go, and go somemore.
:-)
Is there ANY REAL difference ?
Dims hold abortion as a sacrament.
I wasn't the one that called the Nazis Christians.
Perhaps you meant your remarks for someone else, as they otherwise don't make any sense.
Perhaps not in the bible, but what about the Spanish Inquisition? The Crusades? The Salem Witch Trials?
I believe his point is that all religious activity can be brought to the extreme.
Uh, the twelve apostles were for the most part, blue collar fisherman, carpenters...who probably weren't very good at their trade.
My point is only that all religion in many environments is dangerous to anyone that doesn't share the belief or ideology.
I believe his point is that all religious activity can be brought to the extreme.
What about them? None of that was ever condoned by the author or even suggested, infact quite the opposite if you know anything about it! Regardless of the extremisties of religion, the author of Islam condones murder, Christianity certainly does not. People who know NOTHING about Christianity always bring up these periods of time that have nothing to do with it's tenets!
The point he makes is simply wrong...
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