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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (64980)	8/28/2004 3:24:42 PM
From: KyrosL	Respond to of 793955

fear They armed with impunity Sadr, and they are proceeding at full speed with their nuclear bomb program, not even bothering with the fig leaf of UN arms control inspections. Some fear.

To: unclewest who wrote (64980)	8/28/2004 4:15:09 PM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793955

surrounded Reading the following article, I am not sure who has whom surrounded. John Burns wrote the article, hardly an Iraq dove. nytimes.com excerpt: "Both of the cities, Falluja and Ramadi, and much of Anbar Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist militias, with American troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert's edge. What little influence the Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy safe houses identified by scouts who penetrate militant ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for scores of civilian deaths"

To: unclewest who wrote (64980)	8/30/2004 4:32:24 AM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 793955

We have Iran surrounded. Surrounded? How do you figure that? A few thousand men in Afghanistan on one side… what are they going to do? The Pakistanis aren’t going to get involved in any problem we have with Iran. The government of Turkmenistan is too busy with self destruction to worry about Iran, and the Azerbaijanis aren’t much better off. Our forces in Iraq are barely able to maintain order in Iraq, and if we made any move on Iran, we’d have to double the holding force we have in Iraq, because Iraq would explode. You can read their fear in their press releases. Wishful thinking, I’d say. We aren’t going to invade Iran. We know it and they know it. A raid, maybe, but they have certainly planned for that contingency. I don’t doubt that we could defeat the Iranian army, in the unlikely event that they were silly enough to fight a conventional battle with us, or seize any given piece of territory. Occupying the country would be a nightmare, and nobody is going to want to touch that hot potato with the way Iraq is going. Even if the military capacity is there – which it is, with monumental effort, and with substantial risks in other parts of the world – the political will isn’t. We shot that wad already, on a lesser threat. I don’t think Bush has any idea where we go from here. He can’t trust the Neocons: they completely blew their estimation of our ability to control the aftermath of the Iraq war, and nobody wants to get led down that path again. Easy to shout “regime change”, but nobody has a viable plan for doing it without making a politically unacceptable long term commitment. You want to see fear in a press release, look at our administration's comments on Iran. The Iranian nuke program is far more advanced than Saddam’s ever was, but we aren’t threatening military action. We can’t even threaten sanctions in any meaningful way, because everybody knows the threat is hollow. Sanctions on Iran today would mean pulling 3.75 million bpd off the world oil markets – actually more, since they routinely exceed quota - at a time when prices are at record highs, supply is barely able to meet fast-expanding demand, and the only surplus capacity in the world is a debatable 1.5 million bpd in an increasingly unstable Saudi Arabia. Where do you figure oil prices would go if you cut out Iranian production? $75? $100? Look at the consequences of that. Fiscal meltdown in Japan and S. Korea. Instant simultaneous default on a few hundred billion dollars of debt held by developing countries that don’t produce oil. You think the banking system can absorb that? There will be no sanctions, and there will be no invasion. Our leaders have maneuvered us into a box. They could hardly have done it more efficiently if they were doing it on purpose. What do you think we should do if it becomes clear that an Iraqi election will produce a government that wants US troops out of Iraq? If Sistani, who is clearly the most powerful man in Iraq, indicates approval of a political faction that we find unacceptable? Or, perhaps worse, if we get a nominally pro-US government that lacks the ability to govern? If an elected government asked us to leave, what do you think we’d do? Those are the scenarios that favor the Iranians, and we are the ones who created them, by the deluded assumption that we could quickly create and install a stable, democratic, pro-US government in Iraq.