[Rebelbase]

Disinformation.

[narby]

Why else did Bush raise the defense budget so drasticly? He didn't run on enlarging the military. We just need the magic bullets.

[The Great Satan]

We will not attack Iraq until or unless we have some kind of contingency to protect against the threat communicated in the letter to Daschle. As things stand, once Desert Shield II ramps up, we're going to see a sharp uptick in cities wiped out by anthrax: oops, there goes London, there goes Rome, do you feel lucky, Mr. Bush? All isolated incidents of course, probably the work of a loose-knit, distributed network of copy-cat Christian fundamentalist right-to-lifers and renegade mad scientists. You know the routine.

[Thinkin' Gal]

IOW, bombs away.

[TADSLOS]

Days, weeks, months. It doesn't matter as long as it happens before Saddam puts all of his WMD pieces together.

[Thud]

I have no idea about the reliability of that source. IMO we're six months away from attacking Iraq for logistic reasons and lack of precision-guided munitions. No reserve port detachments have been called up yet, etc.

[KC_Conspirator]

Hard to tell, but we are doing things that indicate something may be up, such as our purchasing of buttloads of fuel and having our logistics groups being very active.

[Prodigal Son]

Everybody on the planet will be well aware when we are about to go to war with Iraq. The gov't won't have to say a thing- you'll know it just from the massive numbers of troops and equipment that are getting moved into the area. You can't hide that sort of logistical footprint. It is massive and it costs oodles of money.

It would also be a very safe assumption that this time, we will not stop until Saddam is gone, which will mean going into Baghdad. I suspect rather than withdraw as we did last time, once the actual fighting is over, we will occupy for quite a while until a gov't we are satisfied with is in place (like in Afghanistan).

If you look at the map it is obvious that Iraq is a prime piece of strategic real estate. We would occupy out of "military necessity" and we could stage further military operations from there. It opens up a nice land corridor from Turkey to Axis of Evil member Iran, which would then be almost totally geographically isolated with US occupied Afghanistan to the East, US occup. Iraq to the West, US ally Turkey also to the West and we've just secured use of airbases in Georgia. The only border left is then the one with Pakistan which gives Iran no joy because Musharaf is more or less in our pockets and has bigger fish to fry with their own problems with India.

The Bush admin has to go for the whole kit and kaboodle the way I see it. Totally restructure the Middle East into an entity that is no longer a threat to the western world and the US.