Invade Iran? Hardly.
There is a lot of knee quavering in the radical liberal left that Prez. Bush will invade Iran as an election-year ploy to keep the House and Senate. We invaded Iraq to win a presidential election, after all, why not a mid-term? While that logic IS sound, it does miss a few very key points.
The number one reason why we're not going to invade Iran, period, is manpower. We don't have enough armed forces to open a third front, and that'd be what it is. You think we have Shiite problems now? Hooo boy, you ain't seen nothing yet if we attempt to knock over Iran. Certain neo-cons have shown a willingness to ignore such problems in the past, though, so I can't ascribe that disincentive the weight I'd like. But the fact still remains that for an "Iraq style" regime-change we don't have the man power to pull it off.
Point number two, in order to do even a half-assed job of knocking over Iran we need a lot more men in boots than we do now. The army is having trouble meeting recruitment goals now, just imagine what those goals will look like if we need to commit another 100,000 troops. In order to satisfy the manpower requirements a third front will require, we need to reactivate the draft. Since it'll take at LEAST 6 months from the time a draft is started and inductees start arriving in camps to when those boots hit sand, we'll have to man the barricades with what we already have. Which will be too few, as I've said.
Point number three, the American Regime hasn't been banging the war-drum for Iran the same way it was for Iraq. It'll take time to work up the PR to the point where an invasion of Iran could pass Congress. It took Bush & Co. many months to work up the PR to actually invade Iraq, and we haven't seen enough of that sort of activity.
That said, I can't put it past Bush to try and poke the bee-hive in order to make the angry, threatening buzzing noise louder and try and scare us that way. I don't see him taking a bat to the hive, though. What might happen are surgical strikes at certain Iranian nuclear processing facilities, not a full on invasion. That action would be downright stupid in many, many ways, but that hasn't stopped him before.
Because the Iranians are not stupid, just blinkered by their own extremists which is different from plain old stupidity, they have put those facilities in bomb-proof shelters. Remember, Israel bombed a nuclear reactor in the mid-east in the 1980's, which is something all the Arab regimes in the area remember all too well. This means we can't just fly over their facility with bombers and pucker the desert, we have to get creative. We may need to send in a special forces assault, or perhaps, maybe, risk using a nuclear GBU or two. Since gaining nuclear capacity is one of the few things that most Iranian citizens are behind, doing that will unify Iran against us. It will also exacerbate our problems with Iran's ties to Iraqi Shiites in ways that we'll find truly bloody.
So no, we will not invade Iran on November 2nd. We might kick them somewhere sensitive in order to get them screaming threats at us, but we won't invade ala Iraq. That may happen after the election if the screaming from Iran turns into direct attacks against US interests. If that happens, and they start really annoying us, we might see resolutions to reactivate the draft. I've spoken about what'll happen there several times in the past, so I won't go into that now.
The number one reason why we're not going to invade Iran, period, is manpower. We don't have enough armed forces to open a third front, and that'd be what it is. You think we have Shiite problems now? Hooo boy, you ain't seen nothing yet if we attempt to knock over Iran. Certain neo-cons have shown a willingness to ignore such problems in the past, though, so I can't ascribe that disincentive the weight I'd like. But the fact still remains that for an "Iraq style" regime-change we don't have the man power to pull it off.
Point number two, in order to do even a half-assed job of knocking over Iran we need a lot more men in boots than we do now. The army is having trouble meeting recruitment goals now, just imagine what those goals will look like if we need to commit another 100,000 troops. In order to satisfy the manpower requirements a third front will require, we need to reactivate the draft. Since it'll take at LEAST 6 months from the time a draft is started and inductees start arriving in camps to when those boots hit sand, we'll have to man the barricades with what we already have. Which will be too few, as I've said.
Point number three, the American Regime hasn't been banging the war-drum for Iran the same way it was for Iraq. It'll take time to work up the PR to the point where an invasion of Iran could pass Congress. It took Bush & Co. many months to work up the PR to actually invade Iraq, and we haven't seen enough of that sort of activity.
That said, I can't put it past Bush to try and poke the bee-hive in order to make the angry, threatening buzzing noise louder and try and scare us that way. I don't see him taking a bat to the hive, though. What might happen are surgical strikes at certain Iranian nuclear processing facilities, not a full on invasion. That action would be downright stupid in many, many ways, but that hasn't stopped him before.
Because the Iranians are not stupid, just blinkered by their own extremists which is different from plain old stupidity, they have put those facilities in bomb-proof shelters. Remember, Israel bombed a nuclear reactor in the mid-east in the 1980's, which is something all the Arab regimes in the area remember all too well. This means we can't just fly over their facility with bombers and pucker the desert, we have to get creative. We may need to send in a special forces assault, or perhaps, maybe, risk using a nuclear GBU or two. Since gaining nuclear capacity is one of the few things that most Iranian citizens are behind, doing that will unify Iran against us. It will also exacerbate our problems with Iran's ties to Iraqi Shiites in ways that we'll find truly bloody.
So no, we will not invade Iran on November 2nd. We might kick them somewhere sensitive in order to get them screaming threats at us, but we won't invade ala Iraq. That may happen after the election if the screaming from Iran turns into direct attacks against US interests. If that happens, and they start really annoying us, we might see resolutions to reactivate the draft. I've spoken about what'll happen there several times in the past, so I won't go into that now.
posted by Corwin at 10:30 AM
