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2006-02-12 Syria-Lebanon-Iran
US prepares military blitz against Iran's nuclear sites
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Posted by lotp 2006-02-12 00:00|| || Front Page|| [9 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 Believe it then I see it.
Posted by gromgoru 2006-02-12 01:41||   2006-02-12 01:41|| Front Page Top

#2 Could someone tell me what EFL stands for? Thanks.
Posted by ryuge 2006-02-12 05:24||   2006-02-12 05:24|| Front Page Top

#3 Edited For Length.

Stories tend to have lots and lots of fluff and anyone can go directly to the article itself.
Posted by CrazyFool 2006-02-12 05:28||   2006-02-12 05:28|| Front Page Top

#4 
Redacted by moderator. Comments may be redacted for trolling, violation of standards of good manners, or plain stupidity. Please correct the condition that applies and try again. Contents may be viewed in the
sinktrap. Further violations may result in
banning.
Posted by Constitutional Individualist 2006-02-12 07:14||   2006-02-12 07:14|| Front Page Top

#5 Thanks CF!
Posted by ryuge 2006-02-12 07:15||   2006-02-12 07:15|| Front Page Top

#6 I'm looking at a map of Asia and trying to imagine the flight path from the U.S. to Iran, and noticing that if you don't want to go through Turkish airspace, the most likely path is through Iraq. Indeed, I've been wondering whether the entire Iraq exercise has been nothing more than a means to an end -- Iran. This would explain, for example, the comparative lack of concern about the failure to find WMD in Iraq.
Posted by Perfessor 2006-02-12 07:43||   2006-02-12 07:43|| Front Page Top

#7 I expect they'll stage to Dieago Garcia and maybe, just maybe Guam. We should ask JOE it he's noted any increased construction.
Posted by 6 2006-02-12 09:22||   2006-02-12 09:22|| Front Page Top

#8 Perfesser, in the final months before the Iraq invasion we watched the trucks convoy from Iraq to Syria and then the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Some of those trucks came from Baghdad and were carrying a major portion of Saddam's billions to Syrian banks; and some of those trucks were carrying the household goods of his government-in-exile, which settled in Damascus to handle logistics and disbursement for the "insurgents" Saddam was convinced would drive us weak-willed Americans from his country post-haste. But the majority of it was his WMD stuff; the remainder of which was destroyed in situ in the early days of the invasion -- remember those sterilized portable labs that were found early on? and reports recently that, during the invasion, units of Republican Guards had gone into storage depots to destroy the contents?

President Bush is a typical MBA guy. Every act ideally fulfills multiple needs. In the case of Iraq, it looks like this:

o We need a base centrally located in the Middle East, from which to be able to strike outward militarily, as needed. And it mustn't be Israel, which is already on our side, is too small for the size and number of bases needed, and would not teach the Arab world the necessary lesson, nor Saudi Arabia, where we already were, which was proving more amenable to hosting Islamofascist terrorists than American protectors.

o We need to close down funding and training support of Islamist terrorists. The major funders of terror are Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq.

o We need to stop the research and production of WMD by irresponsible parties. Those parties would be North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Libya.

o The 9/11 attacks were understood by Osama bin Laden and the Muslim World as theater -- showing that Islam can successfully attack the very heart of the West, the attack which was to draw Allah Himself into the decades long war of Islam against the West. There were reports at the time that bin Laden spent 9/11 glued to CNN in his Afghan compound, very surprised that his attacks wrought so much damage -- he'd apparently expected no more than a dramatic fire and a few hundred deaths. His father may have been the construction worker of the House of Saud, but Dad's lad Osama had spent his youth studing the Koran.

o Bush needed a rapid military conquest to dishearten the rest of the region, and trigger change. Maintaining the status quo had clearly not resulted in decreasing the use of terror and terrorists in the region, nor in reducing the level of taught hatred for the West, Israel and the Jews, and the Western liberal ideas of freedom of thought, of speech, of individual responsibility, etc.

o The entire world is hooked on oil, not just the U.S. Saddam Hussein was already talking of cutting off supply or controlling it. He had invaded Kuwait not just because Iraq had always considered Kuwait to have been territory stolen by Britain, but as a first step to controlling the world by conquering the oil fields. Bush pere launched Desert Storm at the request of the Saudis, terrified that Saddam Hussein would make good on his rhetoric by attacking them next. And American troops remained in Saudi Arabi afterward, also at the request of the princelings, in order to protect them from Iraqi revenge.

o Finally, Iraq was low hanging fruit, as they say. The first invasion, the one at the behest of the UN, had been ended only by a truce, not a peace treaty; and from the moment of signing, Saddam Hussein violated the terms, up to and including suborning the UN itself, and bribing the majority of the members of the Security Council (as you'll recall, France, Germany and Russia were the major recipients of Oil for Food contracts ... and kickbacks).

There was a lot of argument here at Rantburg before and after the invasion that Iran should have been chosen the recipient of Bush's martial embrace instead. The arguments being that Iran finances and supports terror, too (Hizb'Allah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad as proxies for its war on Israel), is a force for instability in the region (eg its war with Iraq, which first brought Saddam Hussein to the world's attention), and its youth, making up about half of its population, mostly loathe their religious masters and love America and the West, making them better hosts for a long term American military presence. In the end, though, low-hanging fruit and imminence won out (I don't think at that point we knew much about the scope of Iran's nuclear ambitions, and would have been hard pressed to make convincing arguments thereupon to an audience predisposed to be highly skeptical about anything coming from George Bush's mouth).

Or so I understand it. ;-)
Posted by trailing wife 2006-02-12 10:51||   2006-02-12 10:51|| Front Page Top

#9 A goddess.
Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-02-12 11:02||   2006-02-12 11:02|| Front Page Top

#10 submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks

Hmmm. Either they meant cruise missile or this is going to be big. The only SLBMs I know about are nuclear.
Posted by Jackal">Jackal  2006-02-12 11:23|| http://home.earthlink.net/~sleepyjackal/index.html]">[http://home.earthlink.net/~sleepyjackal/index.html]  2006-02-12 11:23|| Front Page Top

#11 Oh. Now that I actually read the article, I see we are developing conventional SLBMs. I don't see the reason for them, though.
Posted by Jackal">Jackal  2006-02-12 11:24|| http://home.earthlink.net/~sleepyjackal/index.html]">[http://home.earthlink.net/~sleepyjackal/index.html]  2006-02-12 11:24|| Front Page Top

#12 The Bush administration has recently announced plans to add conventional ballistic missiles to the armoury of its nuclear Trident submarines within the next two years. If ready in time, they would also form part of the plan of attack.

This is one of the dumbest ideas the Navy has come up with to justify keeping their boomers sailing.
Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-02-12 11:25||   2006-02-12 11:25|| Front Page Top

#13 TW - You (and a few others like .com) are the reason I continue to read Rantburg. Thank you!
Posted by SR-71">SR-71  2006-02-12 11:46||   2006-02-12 11:46|| Front Page Top

#14 "Indeed, I've been wondering whether the entire Iraq exercise has been nothing more than a means to an end -- Iran. This would explain, for example, the comparative lack of concern about the failure to find WMD in Iraq."

The problem people have in understanding our invasion of Iraq is not that there wasn't a good reason for going there, it's that there are too many-- and most of them cannot be discussed publicly by the administration. I've listed a few of the things we were trying to achieve, here.

Even if our "Islamic Democracy Initiative", or whatever you want to call it, doesn't bear fruit, there are plenty of other benefits to gain from invading Iraq-- not the least of which is we finally have a large land base for our military forces with easy access to Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

Posted by Dave D.">Dave D.  2006-02-12 12:34||   2006-02-12 12:34|| Front Page Top

#15 Dave D, I not only saved the link to that post, but I've printed it out for my permanent collection (against the next time my computer melts down, losing everything).
Posted by trailing wife 2006-02-12 14:16||   2006-02-12 14:16|| Front Page Top

#16 Redacted by moderator. Comments may be redacted for trolling, violation of standards of good manners, or plain stupidity. Please correct the condition that applies and try again. Contents may be viewed in the
sinktrap. Further violations may result in
banning.

Go ahead and ban...who cares. Now this site is falling prey to Dhimmitude also? During WWII we killed as many Nazis and Japanese as possible because that is the goal of all out war. We are at war and the goal is to kill as many of those who would kill as many of us as possible. If that thought is too much for you then....ah, what's the use, Rantburg has gone soft. Too bad. Last post and last time logging on. Good luck all. We will all need it as soon as the enemy has the capability to kill as many of us whether by nuclear, chemical or biological means.
Posted by Constitutional Individualist 2006-02-12 14:50||   2006-02-12 14:50|| Front Page Top

#17 As I read the Sinktrap, killing Islamo Fascists and killing treasonous CIA leakers is unacceptable today. So much for a WOT.
Posted by Darrell 2006-02-12 14:58||   2006-02-12 14:58|| Front Page Top

#18 We did not kill all the Nazis, or even most of them. Nor did we try; our troops killed as many of those fighting against us as was necessary for the rest to surrender. I have a friend, an older German man, who was in high school when the war ended. Naturally, he he had been a member of the Nazi Youth, because there was no alternative, but even at the time he understood why his Jewish best friend had disappeared one day some years before, and what likely had happened to the boy. "Kill them all," means targetting for killing the children who know no better, as well. There may come a time when we are forced to nuke key parts of the Arab world in order to win this war they started. But even so, I hope we never get to the point were our objective is to kill them all, even to the little children and babes in arms.

The Koran makes it clear, as far as I can tell, that Allah grants victory to those He favours. Thus far, He is not showing the Islamofascists his happy face.
Posted by trailing wife 2006-02-12 15:28||   2006-02-12 15:28|| Front Page Top

#19 CI's "target" was "Every Islamo Fascist that can be identified by statements or actions." I don't think that includes "the children who know no better", tw, but it certainly includes the Iranian regime.
Posted by Darrell 2006-02-12 15:56||   2006-02-12 15:56|| Front Page Top

#20 Lest we forget, there were numerous bombing raids during WWII whose very intent was indiscriminate destruction. Think of the 1,000 bomber raid on Hamburg, Dresden and of course the fire bombing of every major city in Japan. While the target was not specifically the innocent babes, those in charge of the raids certainly knew these would be amongst the dead.

These raids were not conducted at the outset of the war, but rather closer to the end.

Prolonged war drives man to become less human. If this conflict continues and becomes more deadly, our devolution will come as certainly as tomorrow's sunrise.
Posted by Remoteman 2006-02-12 16:41||   2006-02-12 16:41|| Front Page Top

#21 TW rocks.
Posted by Perfessor 2006-02-12 17:10||   2006-02-12 17:10|| Front Page Top

#22 Now that I actually read the article, I see we are developing conventional SLBMs. I don't see the reason for them, though.

Lots of places we want to blast but don't want to contaminate with radioactive fallout. Some of them are places we'd rather hit from a sea-based platform and some are places that need more power than a JDAM will deliver.

Like, say, hardened surface-air or surface-surface missile silos near a civilian population.
Posted by too true 2006-02-12 17:58||   2006-02-12 17:58|| Front Page Top

#23 Using a 45 million dollar buck Trident D5 with a 500 kg warhead makes little sense. You gain speed but that limited by intel... I'm not certain what the deal is. Now like Ima mentioned in the past :> If we'd kept a few Titan IIs around and armed them conventionally that would be a different story.
Posted by 6 2006-02-12 18:54||   2006-02-12 18:54|| Front Page Top

#24 That's the problem Too True... the D5 has a small throw weight and the kinetic energy from the speed of impact is not enough to overcome that payload limitation.
Posted by 6 2006-02-12 18:57||   2006-02-12 18:57|| Front Page Top

#25 Understood. But there are advantages as well, among them supersonic speed of delivery with signficant accuracy.

The problem with an all-nuclear sub capability is that most countries will judge, rightly, that the US is not likely to use them to deal with anything less than a nuclear or chem/bio attack on the homeland. Conventional warheads on missiles that can outfly most defenses changes that equation.
Posted by too true 2006-02-12 19:20||   2006-02-12 19:20|| Front Page Top

#26 The USS Ohio just pulled into Naval Station Bangor here within the last two weeks following her conversion. Press commented at the time that follow on boats were coming and being equally based here and at King's Bay Georgia.
I have heard nothing regarding the Ohio's next deployment (but then it's not called the silent service for nothing).
Posted by USN Ret. 2006-02-12 23:14||   2006-02-12 23:14|| Front Page Top

#27 Off-topic or abusive comments deleted]
Posted by Constitutional Individualist 2006-02-12 07:14||   2006-02-12 07:14|| Front Page Top

07:14 Constitutional Individualist
02:22 Sock Puppet O´ Doom
23:53 SteveS
23:33 RD
23:32 plainslow
23:19 Verlaine in Iraq
23:18 Sock Puppet O´ Doom
23:14 USN Ret.
23:00 Robert Crawford
22:55 Robert Crawford
22:51 plainslow
22:50 Robert Crawford
22:48 Frank G
22:40 bgrebel
22:36 JosephMendiola
22:27 JosephMendiola
22:25 Barbara Skolaut
22:21 Jules
22:05 Pappy
21:48 Inspector Clueso
21:43 Fran Disco Librarian
21:34 Humourless
21:33 Duh!
21:32 Besoeker









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