Hello, hello, is this thing on?

Dafydd

Yes, it is on. I like your blog. You are 100% spot on about the whiney-butt wing of the Republican Party. "Homesteaded defeat", is priceless. I sure hope you are right about Bush. I think you are. But, will America follow GWB to war against Iran? The threat has to be credible to be effective.

Mark McGilvray:

I don't think we'll go to war with Iran the same way we went to war against the Taliban and against Saddam Hussein. I think (and hope) we'll launch a massive air attack against the nuke sites... but we're not going to have boots on the ground in Iran in the forseeable future.

That's my prediction, at least.

One intresting point: by 2003, when we invaded Iraq, we had been hitting Saddam with attacks from the air for years. He was used to it. It meant virtually nothing to him; he joked about it to his cabinet.

But since the Iran-Iraq war, when Iran suffered air attacks from Iraq, they have not suffered any attacks from anyone. And even the bombings from Iraq were nothing like what we can unleash.

My point is that Iran is talking big now; but that may be because they have no idea what kind of hell we can unleash from the skies. They think they know what it's like, but they don't; they think they can just weather it, but they can't.

Hussein knew, and he knew from experience he would survive. So we had to do something completely different to gain his attention (and ultimately, his captivity). But a bombing of Iran may have the same salutory effect that Reagan's bombing of Libya had in the 1980s, because Iran is not used to it.

Also, Israel has a number of agents in Iran (unlike Iraq, where no Western nation had any significiant number of spies). I would hope that before any attack by the U.S., we would have Israel contact the anti-mullah resistance in Iran, which is extensive, and prepare them for what may happen: in particular, let them know that we don't want any of the people to get hurt, but we cannot allow the mullahs to get nuclear weapons.

I want them, the moment the bombs start to fall, to lead riots and protests putting the blame where it belongs: on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (the Supreme Leader), his "Assembly of Experts," parliament, and on the Council of Guardians (the mullahs)... not on the United States, which was only acting to defend itself, the resistance must argue.

I hope this might mitigate the natural nationalist tendency for people who come under attack to put aside their own differences with their government (which we don't want them to do) and patriotically rally to their country's side (which we really don't want them to do).

Dafydd

I am fervently hoping we are training Iranian resistance leaders and arming them. This is something our Special Forces excells at and worked extremely well in Afghanistan. Iranian dissatisfaction with its crackpot government is widespread. If there is a country ready for "regime change", Iran is it. An invasion would be a mistake. However, we will need boots on the ground to the extent they can organize armed resistance to the mullahs and to penetrate some of the Iranian nuke sites, which by many accounts are widely distributed, and well bunkered in underground. The Israelis are a Godsend. You can bet the CIA and the rest of our alphabet soup agencies have squat. The mullahs are perfectly capable of putting school children on top of their nuke sites to deter us.

I would certainly look at decapitating the Iranian government and the Revolutionary Guards, or whatever the Mullah's SS is calling itself these days. The Iranian Kurds are boiling according to Blog Iran http://www.activistchat.com/blogiran/
The main complaint from nmost Iranian dissidents is "they [the mullahs troops] have all the guns." Well, that is easily remedied. There are enough soviet weapons in Iraq to equip several revolutions. The problem of organized leadership worries me, in that to prevail, many regular Iranian army officers and troops must mutiny. I haven't much of a feel for that.

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