Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "Cobalt was not quoting Debka predictions; she was quoting Debka reporting of stuff that has already happened. Debka reporting has a pretty good track record, especially in the Middle East."
Debka said that China was going to invade Afghanistan, and that Saudi Arabia had massed troops on the Jordanian border (implying that Saudi Arabia was going to invade Jordan). These were simple Israeli fantasies.
When Debka reports bad news for Israel, then I will believe them (just like I'll believe Tehran when it announces bad news for Iran or Baghdad when it announces bad news for Iraq). Other than that, they're just full of it.
Now let's try and analyze exactly why this war is going on in Iraq but is being kept secret. Is it because they're trying to set up a surprise for Saddam Hussein? LOL!!! When the Iraqi command and control center at al-Nukhaib quits returning his phone calls he'll quickly realize that something is amiss. That should take what, a couple hours to for him to figure out?
If the US were setting up operations in countries other than Iraq, there would be good reason for secrecy, but there simply is none for the Iraqi operations. The idea is to depose Saddam. To do that you need to execute psychological warfare against his regime. The most effective psychological warfare is to make it known that strong forces are just over the horizon and are coming to get him. Keeping your military operations secret isn't very effective psychologically.
What they're doing, even according to Debka, is more accurately described as covert operations, not setting up a full scale invasion of Baghdad. If such a military operation were in execution, the secrecy would be done in order to avoid alarming the public in the US and other allies, not in keeping Saddam in the dark.
But I've read the recent transcripts from Rumsfeld at the DoD web site, and I think that there is no significant military operations going on in Iraq.
In a few minutes I'll publish statistics on US National Guard mobilization. If there's going to be big operations in Iraq (not piddly covert stuff that's been already going on for most of a decade), it will have to show up in the mobilization figures.
-- Carl |
