"Bill Baker" <wbaker@postini.spamcon.org> wrote

As Jon Stewart said, thanks to the Iraq war, the only armies
the U.S. has left are Salvation and KISS.

You mean that because of all the troops we have in Iraq
(Iran's western border) and Afghanistan (Iran's eastern
border), we don't have any to fight Iran?

The U.S. military, actually, has pursued a "two war" policy
since Bush senior. That is two say, funding & supplies
all through the Clinton years have been sufficient to fight
two simultaneous wars the size of the first Gulf war in
1991 (Bush War I).

I agree that we most likely don't have the manpower to
achieve a swift & decisive victory in Iran, but we certainly
have more than enough to achieve all our political/economic
goals. And we also have available AT LEAST 100,000
Kurdish troops who would gladly invade Iran, if we simply
recognize their claims to Iranian-controlled Kurdish areas,
and the creation of a new "Kurdistan."

And it isn't just the United States here. Europe & Japan
rely heavily on Persian Gulf oil... traditionally even more
so than the United States. The U.S. always preferred
Mexican, Venezuelan & Canadian oil, for its proximity
and *Much* lower transportation costs.

Europe could commit AT LEAST as many troops as the
United State.

So right there we're pushing 400,000 ground troops
available for such a war.... plus countless air and
sea forces.

All the Russian equipment in the world wouldn't help
them. Without a matching number of Russian troops
manning that equipment, the shift from a military war
to an insurgency would happen rather quickly, with
the utter defeat of Iran's military in a relatively brief
time.

"erikc" <firewevr@airmail.net> wrote

Actually, I don't give a flying ***** if Iran gets nukes or not.

Neither does Bush.

The "threat" I was talking about was a blockade of the Persian
Gulf.

That means cutting off the world from the oil in Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait, as well as Iraq.

"Matt Silberstein" <RemoveThisPrefixmatts2nospam@ix.netcom.com> wrote

Run through a scenario for me. Give me a potential situation where
"going to war" will be better than not.

I'm not saying that going to war would be better than not going to
war. I'm saying that if Iran makes good on its threat, we will have
no choice.

Fact is, the entire western world crashed after the oil embargo in
the 1970s. If Iran makes good on its threat, a genuine economic
"Depression" -- of the kind seen in the 1930s -- will likely be
upon us.

BTW, Iran won't have nukes for many years.

Irrelevant. What Iran threatened to do is blockade the Persian
Gulf.

Would a 5-7 year "Manhattan Project" on energy help us in that
much time?

No. Not at all. Not in the least. "Success" would be 5 to 7 years
AFTER the economies of the western world completely melted
down... and that's assuming we still had the resources to pump
into the project AFTER the meltdown.

Suppose we had 250,000,000,000 for public transit or for better
coal plants or even for our own nuclear plants? How is a quarter
of a trillion compared to the cost of the war you foresee?

So you want to add a quater of a trillion in spending, on top of the
already record-high deficits & debt, even as our economy would
be constricting at a rate never before seen since the "Great
Depression" started?

A blockade/Embargo is immediate. The effects would be pretty
much instantanious. We don't have five years. We don't have two
years. We don't have one year. We would have no choice but to
go to war while we still had the fuel to power our jets & tanks.