[pbleighton]

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As insane as it sounds perhaps going into any, I mean any war is always a case of tinkering, trial and error?

Which is a good argument against optional wars such as Iraq.

We had NO idea what we were doing in Vietnam, and we have NO idea what we are doing in Iraq.

Peter

[Winstonm]

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Well a downside might also include if one of the those Nukes were used by someone.

In my mind this was included in aggressive use - whether Iran itself used them or supplied them to others for use.

I wonder how hard it would be to smuggle a nuclear device into a country and successfully detonate it - seems to me an incredibly difficult task.

[mike777]

Winstonm, on Aug 30 2007, 06:35 PM, said:

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Well a downside might also include if one of the those Nukes were used by someone.

In my mind this was included in aggressive use - whether Iran itself used them or supplied them to others for use.

I wonder how hard it would be to smuggle a nuclear device into a country and successfully detonate it - seems to me an incredibly difficult task.

I would think that would be the easy part, hard part is getting a working one.
Technically you would not even need to get onto usa soil for it to cause devastion in a border town.
Note a bomb could go off in port or in the air without ever clearing inspection or customs here in the USA.

[BebopKid]

kenrexford, on Aug 30 2007, 12:55 PM, said:

Beyond that, so what? This is a real world we live in, not a fairy-tale world. Some of us have power. We use that so that someone else does not. That's not very nice, but such is life. A nice lion will starve.

I'll also add that in the U.S. unlike many other countries, the entire military is volunteer and staffed by brave people willing to stand up and go forth.

[DrTodd13]

They are pulling the same crap now that they did 5 years ago to motivate invading Iraq. It was all lies then and it is all lies now. The IAEA says that Iran is only enriching to levels suitable for power generation. There's a huge difference between 4% U235 and 95% U235. Moreover, the Iranian President doesn't have that much power and the real power brokers in Iran don't seem to have any interest in developing nukes or launching a war against Israel. We all hear that their President has said he wants to wipe Israel off the map but I have heard that this is a convenient mistranslation. Undoubtedly, he doesn't like Israel and wants it not to exist but as far as really threatening war I have my doubts he has said that.

I have several close Jewish friends and I believe in Israel's right to exist and even believe that the Muslims are the main instigators in that conflict. What I don't like is the seeming influence of the Zionist lobby that got Congress to remove the statement from one of the Iraq funding bills that Bush cannot attack Iran without express authorization from Congress. I think some people in high places have dual loyalties. There's absolutely nothing in Iran that is an imminent threat to us.

[rbforster]

Winstonm, on Aug 30 2007, 06:35 PM, said:

I wonder how hard it would be to smuggle a nuclear device into a country and successfully detonate it - seems to me an incredibly difficult task.

About as hard as smuggling 10 tons of cocaine into the US? I sure hope it's harder to get a working nuke, but I'm not keeping my hopes up. At least if Iran launched their nuke on a good old fashion ICBM we'd know who shot it and which country to reduce to radioactive slag. A bomb going off in a big city leaves us with millions of dead people and no target (or rather too many targets).

[Al_U_Card]

kenrexford, on Aug 30 2007, 05:53 PM, said:

At some point somewhere someone who wants to grab things away from me must be beat down or threatened with a beat-down, because they will no more listen to anything reasonable than would the idiot on the street in my town would if he was given a big gun and a pile of money in front of him.

This is the only part of your quote that troubles me. Misperception is a result of manipulation and not wrong-headedness. We have to wake up and be aware of how we are being coerced. When we are the bully how do we justify threatening the beating when we are trying to steal someone's lunch money?

.
http://takingaimradi...ngaim070814.mp3

Quote:
That’s the furniture of control, the operational means through which the rulers conduct their affairs. So there is a conspiratorial character to the way in which they rule, because they cannot say to the American people, [e.g.] ‘We want to obtain the resources of Indochina. We want to displace the French colonial control of Indochina. And in order to accomplish that, we’re going to generate events that are of our own making such as the Gulf of Tonkin.’ When we were told, were we not?, that the North Vietnamese had fired on an American ship. They would have had every right to do so. These were US destroyers, a naval armada, in territorial waters of Vietnam. Oh, fie! They fired on these intruding forces – but in fact, it never happened. Nobody is in dispute any more about the fact that this was an invention.

And that’s the pretext and that’s the rationale, that’s the justification for visiting a devastating war on this suffering people, that transformed their country into the landscape of the moon, that killed between three and four million people, that entailed intelligence operations of our special forces that are now unfolding in Iraq before our eyes but which in Vietnam, in such things as the Phoenix Program, required the systematic murder of 60,000 people on the ground: village leaders, students, trade unionists, people who were of those oppressed people in Vietnam, physically liquidated. Talk about state terror. So that is the nature of rule in an economic and political order that is essentially the domain of pirates whose proper flag is a skull and crossbones.

[TimG]

Rob F, on Aug 31 2007, 03:32 AM, said:

At least if Iran launched their nuke on a good old fashion ICBM we'd know who shot it and which country to reduce to radioactive slag.

Hyperbole aside, why would it be right for the US to reduce the entire country to radioactive slag?

Iran has something like 70 million citizens. Would they all be responsible?

Perhaps there is a good argument that they are all responsible. Sort of in the same way that all US citizens are responsible for the current military actions in the middle East. Those of us who are opposed to the actions, can voice our opinions, but when it comes right down to it, we are making the actions possible. And, must bear some of the responsibility.

[kenrexford]

Al_U_Card, on Aug 31 2007, 10:59 AM, said:

Misperception is a result of manipulation and not wrong-headedness.

I'm not all that certain that I am misperceiving the big picture.

A lady at my bridge club is about to turn 100 years of age. So, she was alive before WWI. What has the big picture been in her lifetime?

When she was born, a few European nations were in control of almost everything. The colonial powers were largely places that wanted to be in control of almost everything, but they lost at some point.

The powers in Europe fought amongst each other and some power arrangements seemed to shift slightly. This allowed some new powers, old powers long forgotten but resurfacing, to gain new powers.

A generation later, this new power tilt boiled over, and millions died. Power shifted in a major way. Power vacuums developed, with sources for very old power having some breathing space.

The new powers pushed at each other while vacuums started to fill. One large area of relative power vacuum, at one time an area of extreme power, has tried a new tactic.

What I see in this story, so far, are a few things.

Power moves. It may seem to increase or decrease in specific areas, but it seems relatively assured to emerge.

Powers end up fighting, and lots of people die as a result.

All power is used to the benefit of those holding the power and to the detriment of those not having the power. That seems to be because power is the most important asset, one that cannot be shared effectively.

Within the range of power-holders, some are more troubling than others.

The effects of power concentration in an area seem to be most disturbing when the power must also be used internally.

Dogs fight over food. Most dogs are otherwise fairly nice pets, but they do fight over food. The nice dog that does not fight over food goes hungry.

Some dogs have fought too much, having been trained by their masters to kill senselessly. Those dogs are usually subject to extreme rules by the government and often must be put down. You just cannot trust a dog that bites for no reason.

Yet, dogs always have a reason. Ultimately, however, that does not matter.

[Al_U_Card]

Sadly, but realistically, the US is just following in the footsteps of its predecessors. The Maine, Pearl Harbor, The Gulf of Tonkin, 9-11. The powers that be exercise their control to further their ends and are very sanguine about it. The US was founded in an attempt to restore a certain measure of power to the people. Unfortunately, it was a noble experiment that appears to be in failing health.

[mikeh]

My main emotional reaction to the suggestion that the US might invade Iran (or otherwise attack it) is sadness... alloyed with muted outrage. Muted because I suspect I have become somewhat desensitized to the incredibly twisted spin put on foreign affairs by most media, which tamely repeat the government's message.

Even the opposition party(ies) in most democracies only speak against the government approach when they see it to be politically expedient, rather than morally correct... and, in fairness, it seems that most opposition politicians are no more told the truth than is the public. The government controls the information, and information is power.

So we have a view of Iran put together from a variety of sources.. which ones influence us the most depends upon our own biases and the media we 'trust'. But the vast majority of media lack access to the raw data, and thus must in turn incorporate a great deal of government-endorsed information.

This is particularly a problem when we, as a public, do not speak or read the language of the 'enemy'. Few of us ever have access to more than one or two versions of translations, and no media, to my knowledge, ever purports to translate an entire speech (for example), when quoting or misquoting a particularly inflammatory passage.

I read the Economist: now, I don't think it is perfect, but its views largely coincide with mine, in terms of 'values': fiscal conservatism, but not robber-baron-capitalism, and social liberalism. This is a combination almost unheard of in US political circles, where even the Democrats are, by comparison to many European politicians, socially conservative, and the Republicans rabidly (and often hypocritically) so.

What I like most about the Economist is that while it is clearly biased in favour of western rationalism, it does try, so it seems, to be objective in the discussion of the policies of other nations. Unlike, say, Time or Newsweek, which pander, quite blatantly, to the US government and that bane of US politics: 'patriotism'.

Even Orwell would have been hard-pressed to come up with the name The Patriot Act for a document intended to strip the world's greatest democracy of many of the safeguards that made it such a great democracy.

As it is, with the spin doctors in control, the American public is terrified that some Iranians will either directly or indirectly nuke some US city.

Why on earth would anyone do that? Does anyone think that a political/religious leader smart enough to manipulate his way to the top of the power struggle in Iran, or any other country, would initiate mass-suicide (including his own) in that way? Maybe if he feared that he was going down anyway... nothing left to lose... but why would any such leader get to that state unless the US drove him there?

Ask instead who gains from inculcating this fear.

While Roosevelt was himself a duplicitous leader (not a knock on him, per se... it is the nature of the beast), he had it right when he, or his speechwriter, said We have nothing to fear except fear itself. Edit: I idiotically attributed this to JFK when I first posted this, and have been set straight

So my take on 'should the US use military force on Iran' is to ask what is the true motive for (1) keeping the idea alive, (2) actually doing it.

Not: what are the justifications that the politicians and their tame commanders and intelligence specialists pronounce or 'leak', but what is really going on.

As an example, what did Cheney intend with Iraq, as opposed to what did George Bush want?

[BebopKid]

DrTodd13, on Aug 30 2007, 11:39 PM, said:

What I don't like is the seeming influence of the Zionist lobby that got Congress to remove the statement from one of the Iraq funding bills that Bush cannot attack Iran without express authorization from Congress.

Umm, this is misinformation.

The U.S. President must have authorization from Congress to go to war.

The U.S. President has the power to defend the U.S. in emergencies without authorization from Congress. A statement in a funding bill would not change this as the Constitution overrides.

I will also remind everyone that Congress authorized the invasion of Iraq, also. This was done to enforce U.N. resolutions that Iraq was not responding to.

[BebopKid]

mikeh, on Aug 31 2007, 11:51 AM, said:

While JFK was himself a duplicitous leader (not a knock on him, per se... it is the nature of the beast), he had it right when he, or his speechwriter, said We have nothing to fear except fear itself.

I love when people have no idea what they are talking about.

How are we supposed to believe these rants when you don't know who said, "We have nothing to fear except fear itself."

I'll give you a hint, it was said on December 8, 1941.

[hrothgar]

BebopKid, on Aug 31 2007, 08:47 PM, said:

DrTodd13, on Aug 30 2007, 11:39 PM, said:

What I don't like is the seeming influence of the Zionist lobby that got Congress to remove the statement from one of the Iraq funding bills that Bush cannot attack Iran without express authorization from Congress.

Umm, this is misinformation.

Dr Todd's comments are quite accurate.

A few months ago, the congressional Democrats were considering attaching a ammendment to one of the supplemental budget authoritizations supporting the war in Iraq. The ammednment was intended to clarify that when COngress granted Bush the authority to go to war against Iraq they did not authorize any type of military action against Iran. (Simply put, the ammednment would require that Bush go back to congress and get approval to go to war with Iran).

The congressional demoncratic leadership caved and withdrew the ammendment after heavy lobbying by AIPAC. This incident was discussed here ont he BBO forums at the time that it happened.

[mikeh]

BebopKid, on Aug 31 2007, 12:49 PM, said:

mikeh, on Aug 31 2007, 11:51 AM, said:

While JFK was himself a duplicitous leader (not a knock on him, per se... it is the nature of the beast), he had it right when he, or his speechwriter, said We have nothing to fear except fear itself.

I love when people have no idea what they are talking about.

How are we supposed to believe these rants when you don't know who said, "We have nothing to fear except fear itself."

I'll give you a hint, it was said on December 8, 1941.

ooops, again: oh well, so I shouldn't recite passages from faulty memory. However, your (valid) correction, (and I realized my error immediately on reading your post and am embarrassed to have made it) actually strengthens my point. Anyone who has read anything about the events preceding Pearl Harbour, including the correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt knows that Roosevelt was trying very, very hard to find a way into the war... and there is at least a strong argument that he or people close to him chose to ignore warnings (East Wind Rain was one of the codes intercepted a couple of days before Pearl Harbour, when the US knew the code in use) so as to ensure that the attack wsa not headed off. So Roosevelt was a duplicitous leader... and as I said that is not necessarily a criticism of him in the circumstances. Your views may differ.

BTW, what (apart from a silly and embarrassing misattribution of a presidential quote) made what I said a 'rant'? Or is it your position that anything that questions the moral integrity of the leaders of the US is unacceptable and thus a 'rant'?

[hrothgar]

BebopKid, on Aug 31 2007, 08:49 PM, said:

mikeh, on Aug 31 2007, 11:51 AM, said:

While JFK was himself a duplicitous leader (not a knock on him, per se... it is the nature of the beast), he had it right when he, or his speechwriter, said We have nothing to fear except fear itself.

I love when people have no idea what they are talking about.

How are we supposed to believe these rants when you don't know who said, "We have nothing to fear except fear itself."

I'll give you a hint, it was said on December 8, 1941.

Bebop, you might want to tread very carefully when you start talking about people who have no idea what they are talking about.

Roosevelt's statement "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" is actually from his first inaugural address in 1933. He was talking about the Great Depression, not the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The reasonate phrase from the Pearl Harbor speach was "A date that will live on in infamy"

[Al_U_Card]

mikeh, on Aug 31 2007, 01:02 PM, said:

Or is it your position that anything that questions the moral integrity of the leaders of the US is unacceptable and thus a 'rant'?

Why would you question something that they don't have?

Infamy....like when they cancelled the bomber patrols out of the Aleutians on Dec. 6th 1942 because they didn't want the pilots to report on the known (by the US high command) location of the incoming Jap fleet.

[TimG]

BebopKid, on Aug 31 2007, 12:49 PM, said:

I love when people have no idea what they are talking about.

How are we supposed to believe these rants when you don't know who said, "We have nothing to fear except fear itself."

I'll give you a hint, it was said on December 8, 1941.

Wasn't it actually: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

And, I don't think it had anything to do with WWII.

[Al_U_Card]

The only thing they have to fear is being found out....

[pbleighton]

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Wasn't it actually: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

And, I don't think it had anything to do with WWII.

Correct. It was in reference to the Depression, and was in FDR's inaural address in 1933.

Thise who can, do.

Those who can't, teach.

Those who can't teach.....

Peter