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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elroy who wrote (290054)	6/5/2006 9:00:09 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573952

Oh, absolutely. I agree with you that the Iranians have every right to withold oil and I agree with you that we should dare them to do it, because we know they won't. It's their lifeblood and they need the money more than we do. However, Americans act as if they are held hostage to oil. We're so damn soft that we don't have the guts to play chicken with Iran. Reagan had the guts. He knew that he had to bankrupt Russia, so he colluded with the Saudis to pump massive amounts of oil to undercut the price of oil to drive the Russians into bankruptcy. In addition, he started the arms race, knowing full well that America would be able to outspend Russia. It was a brilliant strategy and it worked. America did pay a price for the collapse of Russia, though. We went into massive debt and we experienced the 70's downturn. We're faced with a similar situation with Iran, except we can't play the oil card because there isn't a whole lot of spare capacity with which to do that. In addition, Bush and this government is too full of darn cowards. They aren't willing to risk the health of our economy to take Iran down. We could face them down economically, very easily. We could force them to make good on their threat to withold oil and we could spend hundreds of billions on getting off of our addiction to oil. We probably would experience a recession due to that, but long term we would be an order of magnitude better off. But that would require real leadership from the US government and we haven't got any real leaders with brains in Congress or in the White House right now.