[ARCHIVED THREAD] - How long before we hit Iran? (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 1/7/2008 5:54:15 AM EDT
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Now it seems Iran is stepping up their old mess with the US game by messing with the Navy. I'm wondering how far and how much they will do before we say enough's, enough and hit them and hit them hard so they wont ever mess with the USA again? Link |
Why you....you....UNPATRIOTIC AMERICAN! How dare you think there's anything wrong with America!! Don't you know we're the best darn country in the world--and that means we simply DO NOT have anything wrong with us!!  I'll bet you're not a real American, either--probably one of those freaky people who take up karate or some such...  I still think we should take out Canada...especially Quebec, they speak French there... Anyone notice I changed my avatar?   It's just a temp though....
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I've earned the right to speak my mind. 
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Exactly, lets hit Cali. It is warmer there, we speak the language of roughly half the inhabitants, and I have spies in the Southern part of the state. Don't worry about resistance from the Marines in SoCal as they are my people. |
I think that is being a bit generous! |
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I believe Bush & company have been interested in attacking Iran for some time now. Their last big PR blitz to build momentum toward war kind of got derailed, but it didn't put an end to their desire for war with Iran. However, I also have no problem believing that Iranian forces, especially the Revolutionary Guards, would behave in an inflamatory, deliberately provocative manner. Despite the whole Persian/Arab antipathy, most of the 'Arab street' would automatically consider Iran to be the good guy in a shooting match with the US. They can be just as provocative as they want, secure in the knowledge that we'll get the blame for whatever happens. So on the one hand you've got a crooked administration beating the drum to further war through dishonesty and cynical PR efforts. On the other hand you've got a regime who'll happily spend their subjects' blood to make the US look bad. Hard to find an angel here. |
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Two wars? As in Afghanistan and Iraq? I think going into Afghanistan in pursuit of Al Quaida and the Taliban government that harbored them was justified by 9/11. But Iraq? No way. |
Unfortunately too many people still want their big ass gas guzzling trucks and the only way to have that is to have the oil flowing from the Middle East. And that requires a stable (ish) Middle East. Preferably one that is either friendly to us, or under our control. Either go to war or learn a slightly different lifestyle. |
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Great start. The war was for oil remember? The whole world said it, fuck em. It's payback time, Kuwait, Iraq time to start pumping at a discount. OPEC members you are not. Our economy has been fucked up saving your ass, time to pay the piper. Time to make the juice worth the squeeze. |
Kinda hard to argue against that! 
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Canadian Bacon More Canadian Bacon |
All Bush's fault because of his oil ties, not imo.  More people are killed by Islamists each year than in all 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition combined. They want to rule the world through terror, period. From the list of Cleric ordered Murders not connected to oil in any way... 1/4/2008 - A 43-year-old villager is shot to death by Muslim militants in Thailand. 1/2/2008 - Islamic fundamentalists bomb a police station in Algeria, killing at least five people, including a 10-year-old girl. 1/2/2008 - Islamists bomb a local market in Somalia, killing three civilians. This list has thousands of victims on it from countries all over the world. It continues to pile up day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade. These criminal clerics must be killed or marginalized for our own safety. Some of you are whining at the president's strategy to take the fight to the heart of mulllaland, with the only weapon they fear, a free, democratic, educated populus. OK, let's hear your plan to avoid letting them murder until they rule the world.  |
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Boomer, You say taking down. Odd. You don't mention all the building up we are doing. You don't mention that a secular Iraq guaranteed one third of the county would support us. Can you make that same claim for Afganistan? Perhaps you'd rather we started with Saudi Arabia? Look at the chess board, bad idea. You also didn't answer the question, just as everyone opposed to this war I speak to. They'll venture special ops, political venues, economic pressure, everything but killing or marginalizing these criminals. It always seems to boil down to one theme. Nothing is worth fighting for. I believe survival is well worth it. Now. How would you stop these assholes from murdering until they rule the world? PS: Oh yeah, we tore the ass out of France, and most of Europe to squeeze the nazis into a managable hole. Remember? |
Good points Spyda - many others that I snipped out as well. Hard to argue with the idea that there's a set of radical imams out there who are bent on world domination, and aren't above wiring up a baby with explosives to help that happen. I believe survival is worth fighting for. I believe some principles are worth fighting for. I think where you and I differ is whether or not Iraq helped or hindered our fight against radical Islam. I believe invading Iraq has ultimately weakened our position in this fight. I don't want to prattle on too much, so here just a few of my thoughts about our invasion of Iraq: 1) The administration played fast and loose with the facts about WMD's to get us into this fight. As more and more information about that dishonesty comes to light, other countries are less and less inclined to believe what we have to say. The end result is that people in other countries are now more inclined to believe our enemies than us. That hurts our ability to build coalitions to fight these nutjobs. 2) The invasion of Iraq has cost a great deal of money, and has helped to destabilize our economy. We're continuing to shell out billions of dollars and our economy is continuing its circular journey around the fiscal toilet. Our currency is weak, and our debt is held by foreigners. We're in a poor position to pay for further fights against radical Islam. 3) The invasion of Iraq has taken a toll on the readiness and capability of our soldiers and our equipment. I've been so damn impressed with most of the soldiers I've met; their devotion and their capability are beyond reproach. And we've got some of the most effective weapon systems out there. But we've ground down both our men and our equipment. Folks are tired, and some are disillusioned. Our equipment is likewise worn, and getting a lot of it back out of Iraq would itself be a pretty Herculean endeavor. The result is, we're not in a good position to fight another war against a strong regional power, like say Iran. So, blah, blah, blah - DirtyBird doesn't like the war in Iraq. You asked what else could be done to fight radical Islam. Here are some of my ideas: A) Spend time and money to improve our human intelligence capability. Years into this fight, we still depend to a great degree on electronic intelligence, and sadly, rumor intelligence. The bad thing about Elint and Rumint is that they often give you bad information. By contrast, human intelligence collected from actual live agents and informants is usually more worthwhile. The Israelis used to be past masters at Humint, though these days they seem to be adopting a more technical Elint approach, to their peril. If we developed our Humint capability, we'd be better informed about who means to do us harm, and where they are. B) Use the information gathered through Humint to target and kill the radical clerics and followers who mean to do us harm. And kill them from spitting distance, not from 30,000 feet. The personal approach would minimize collateral damage, which would reduce the number of new enemies we grow. Keep in mind that when we say 'collateral damage' someone else says father, mother, sister, brother, or child. If someone were to kill anyone in my family, let alone, God forbid, my wife or children, then that someone would be my sworn enemy. To use the Israeli example again, they had better luck killing people up close with pistols in the past than they've had with Apaches and Hellfires lately. C) Take a law enforcement approach to those we're not able to kill quietly. The folks who tried to blow up the World Trade Center the first time around are doing time. The man responsible for knocking them down the second time is comfortably hidden, enjoying dialysis and cable TV in a cave somewhere in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. The great thing about courts, trials and law enforcement is that they carry with them the air of legitimacy. By contrast, using puffed up intelligence to justify an invasion does not. It might be a pain in the ass to pay for public defenders for terrorists, but at the end of the day, if you get a conviction out of it, it's beyond reproach. D) Stop the wholesale extralegal imprisonment and torture of people we think, just maybe, might be terrorists. This would free us up to extralegally imprison and torture the relatively few high-value people we've captured. In Afghanistan, we paid bounties for 'terrorists.' The result was, lots of unlucky people got sold to us by folks looking to pay down their debts. Unlucky for them, and useless for us. Likewise, in Iraq, we've rounded up a very high number of folks, with the idea we'd get the bad with the good and sort them out at some later date. But take somebody and jail and torture them for a couple of years and then release them, and you've just grown a new enemy. It's like a Goddamn salmon farm for growing new Haji. Far better to be very selective about who's rights we violate. E) Quit with the black and white, us against them, bipolar worldview. The reality is, the majority of the world thinks we're assholes, a whole nation of R-32's. But, the majority of the world isn't interested in actively killing us. By framing the discussion as a zero sum proposition, we're driving people away from us. Far better to let people dislike us in peace, and only kill those relatively few who want to kill us. F) Quit empowering our own religious fringe. Every story about christian hazing of non-believers at our military academies, every column that calls Islam itself a radical religion bent on destroying the western world, and really, every damn infidel patch out there serves only to turn this into a religious war. And guess what the bloodiest, most protracted, pointless kind of war is? Yup, religious war. The reality is, the number of muslims who will actively try to kill non-believers is small. Many of the rest might think Christians are assholes, but I'll refer you back to point E above. And if we continue to frame this as a religious war, we will empower our own religious fundamentalists. I don't want to live in a fundamentalist Christian America any more than I want to live in a radical Islamic America. G) Get our Goddamn economic house in order. We need a strong currency, a manufacturing base, and enough tax revenue to pay for our governmental commitments. Instead we've got a weak currency, inflated corporate profits by way of offshoring everything, and tax break after tax break for the plutocrats. What kind of shape are we in to fight a global fight against radical Islam if China holds so much of our debt? I believe if we did more of A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, and less of cooking up facts to justify invading a country so that we can turn it into our armored gas station, we'd be in a better position to win the fight against radical Islam. And lest anyone say otherwise, I think Iran is a big damn threat, and a nuclear-armed Iran is an even bigger one. But thanks to Bush, we are about in as bad a position to do anything about it as we could be. I don't think the situation is hopeless, but we need a smarter, better man than Bush at the helm to get us out of it. |
Do you have a list showing victims of Israeli snipers and bulldozers? That is in the thousands already... Oh, the drama. Did you have violins playing when you wrote that? LOL--first America is SUPPOSED to be a REPUBLIC, not a democracy...and given that 99% of Americans DON'T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE we can't really say we're "educated", now can we? Freedom is, of course, a moot point....we have the chains around us, the 'gov just hasn't tightened them yet. Do you trust Obama? Hillary? Do you trust either of the major parties with our "freedoms" that they grant via permits, waiting periods, taxes? Every war is justified by saying "the enemy wants to take over the world!" whether or not it is true....the fact remains that WE want to take over the world, "to make it safe for democracy!" And *that* is vile. |
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Well put, Dirtybird. The only thing I'd add would be a point tangential to beefing up our economy - beef up our education and infrastructure. Our universities are tops, that's not the education in question, but our elementary, middle, and high schools are just going down the drains. The kids are getting surpassed left and right in almost all areas of academia compared to kids from other countries. We need to seriously reform our educational system so that we can continue to compete (and suceed) on an international economic level. More smart kids = more smart kids in our colleges = more smart adults = more jobs = better economy. Redo infrastructure too! One of the fundamental points in state developmental theory is that if you want your economy to grow and your state to prosper (although it may not be a short run change), start working on your infrastructure! It's guaranteed payoff. Repair roads, make new ones, make new power plants, make things more efficient... It's guaranteed to make your nation better without fail. And, of course, it makes jobs! Think of how many jobs you'd make if we started a serious, nationwide infrastructural overhaul...
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Ironically, there is a Arabian Proverb that answers your question...
Easy to question the arming of these people now, but what would have or could have happened in decades past, had we not? |
They wouldn't have had the money, or the reach if not for oil. The entire Middle East would be like the vast majority of Africa. Perhaps tribal warfare, but it wouldn't affect anyone else, and nobody would really care. |
True. Yet it is ironic...makes you think about what will happen in Iraq and Afghanistan 30 years from now. |