War! The fear mongering is here, again!

I dont think that the majority of the U.S. population is interested in fighting any more foreign wars, but the conservative politicians have to have a "dangerous" foreign country to scare the country with and Iran is as good as any especially since the Isralies want it so.

I suspect I know what your response will be, RABEL222, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts, anyway (I might even be surprised!) .... why do you think it's in the interests of ultra-conservative politicians to scare the US population about dangerous outside "threats" to such a degree?

What an asshole. Nothing about what i wrote suggests that the defense teams for Japanese officers accused of war crimes are authorities of any subject. In this case you aren't being obtuse, you're being dense. That was ironic sarcasm to point up the idiocy of the author's claim that sanctions are acts of war.

I can't for a moment accept Engineer's thesis about Iran being able to back the United States into a corner leaving no option but war to maintain credibility. That's a pretty silly position to maintain. Nothing Iran can do short of a thermonuclear attack is going to lead the United States to attack them, except perhaps an invasion of Iraq.

Miss Olga, the neoconservatives in the United States set out an agenda in the late 1990s through an organization known as the Project for a New American Century. I've linked the PNAC web site here on many occasions. For a while, the site was down, and there was a message basically to the effect that they hadn't paid their bills. Then it was available again, but they'd cleaned it up, removing many of the documents which were once available (position papers, largely) which revealed their world view with regard to the middle east.

I haven't been there for a couple of years, but the last time i looked their material over, they still had not removed all the evidence of their core policy toward the middle east. Basically, they contend that the United States and American national interest of right ought to dominate the 21st century. To that end, they advocate the control, by military means if necessary, of the petroleum resources of the middle east. As early as 1997, the members of the PNAC had written to President Clinton calling for an invasion of Iraq. They called for the establishment of permanent military bases in Iraq after such an invasion, and before it all started to go downhill for Bush Jr., those bases were being built.

The founding members of PNAC were people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle--people who had held positions of authority in the Reagan administration, or would do so in the second Bush administration. The neoconservatives are very much in disfavor in hard-core conservative circles in the United States, but their call for military action to preserve American national interests with regard to petroleum found a sympathetic ear with many American conservatives who would othewise despise the neoconservatives.

The call for military action against Iran, despite its incredible idiocy, is very popular among American conservative circles both because of the belief in an American "manifest destiny" do dominate petroleum producing regions and countries, and a sense of wounded vanity. I would wish to impress upon you, however, that these voices are not an expression of majority interests in the United States, and domestic issues remain most people's top interests. Once again, short of an invasion of Iraq or precipitating a thermonuclear exchange with Israel, there is no plausible scenario in which the United States would be "forced" to take military action against Iran.

Our current deterioration in relations with Iraq stems from a move several years ago by the Persians to get international petroleum prices quoted in Euros rather than U.S. dollars. Had they been successful, that would have done a lot of economic damage to the United States, and, of course, to the American energy investment sector in particular. But they weren't successful, and given the current woes of the Euro, such a switchover is even more unlikely.

Iran does not possess intercontinental ballistic missiles with which they could directly threaten the United States, and, of course, any such attempt would result in a massive retaliation the result of which would be to turn Iran into a glass-paved parking lot. The Persians are not stupid, and they know this. The only other people whom they could threaten with nuclear-armed missiles (apart from Israel) would be the Europeans, who are their best petroleum customers. Sanctions might hurt Iran, but they're not about to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Whether people at this web site understand what's going on here or not, the people at Foggy Bottom do. No sane foreign policy adviser in the United States contemplates military action against Iran.

Thanks for that information, Setanta.

Oops. Foggy Bottom, in case you didn't know this, Miss Olga, is a neighborhood in Washington, D.C., which is where the offices of the United States State Department are located, and references to Foggy Bottom among Americans refer to foreign policy.

Ah.
I was wondering ....
Thanks.

Given that we had not used our weapons for 66 years I do not see why not.

Trying selling that nonsense to the Chineses or the Koreans or the............

Poor poor peaceful Japanese force into war by the evil US...........

Rewriting History is so must fun for some people it would seems.

Others may disagree, but attacking Iran and war are not the same. If Iran tries to attack a US carrier in the Gulf, it would be fairly easy for Obama to authorize cruise missile attacks up and down the Iranian coast in retaliation. While the US public might have war fatigue, it never tires of watching videos of missiles blowing up "enemy" buildings.

The idea that Obama can not respond to even a feeble attempt on a carrier or any other Navy ship is silly. That would be political suicide. Iran doesn't have to succeed, only make something that can be spun into a credible attack.

That was a great post, setanta. I appreciate it when a complex thought can be succinctly put into words we all can understand.

And you think the Persians are stupid enough to try that? I don't think so, personally.

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Thanks Edgar. The author of this thread leaves me mystified as to why he believes what he says. I find his thesis to be too simplistic.

"Persians" in general, no. Their government in particular - not so sure. Just like the US.

Well the results of any attack on a US carrier battle group should be more fun to watch then a large fourth of July firework show.

As far as I know no one had been that stupid since WW2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBGPw_LBiRA

Anybody else wondering why the libs and dems would be crying about warmongering when they have their own man in the whitehouse???

The mullahs have been very careful to do their covert operations through proxies, such as Hezbollah and Hamas. The Revolutionary Guard funds all sorts of organizations considered to be terrorist organizations by the United States government and some European governments. But they don't go out to do the grunt work themselves, they use proxies for that. They tried some of that **** in the "tanker war" in the Persian Gulf twenty and thirty years ago, and their pathetic little navy got their collective ass handed to them. U.S.S. Stark was hit by Iraqi exocet missles, not missiles from the Persians. When one U. S. ship hit mines sown by the Persians, we responded by basically sinking every ittle armed fishing boat they had. I'd be interested to know just what you think Iran has with which to attack our navy.

Or could it be that the really bad misuses of the US military (Nam, Bosnia, Kosovo...) all seem to occur under demoKKKrat administrations??

The foregoing is from Global Security-dot-org's article on the Iran navy. You can read the entire article by clicking on this link. Iran's principle threat in the gulf remains the interruption of commerce. They just aren't a credible military threat to the United States Navy, or even the Saudis, for that matter.

An all major economic disasters seems to occur when the GOP is in power.