OH NO! Is this the start of the US attacking Iran?

[Fruitfrenzy]

Well my evidence comes from people that used to live there and currently visit once a year. Where does yours come from?

I am Iranian.

 

[Willmeister]

I have two Iranian friends in one of my EE classes I knew before through a mutual friend of ours in residence. They've basically told us that the editorials and speeches from the hardliners are playing to the fears that Iranians have of another US intervention a la 1953 and this prospect is not sitting too well. This fear is highly effective as many Iranians are still around who can recite stories of the last US puppet who ruled over their nation. As bad and as corrupt as the Khamenei junta is, it's not surprising a population finds it much more palatable to be ruled by a dictator of their own rather than a puppet that does the Western world's (particularly the USA) bidding like the Pahlevis.

You'll note the Iranian student demonstrations have all but evaporated with an extremely timid crackdown. In fact, the more the USA calls for regime change in Iran, the more entrenched the regime becomes. Iranian student movements are calling for internal reform without US help. Firstly, it won't sit well with the populace seeing the USA at it again in internal Iranian politics, and no one really wants to owe anyone anything, and if the USA goes into Iran, they're gonna want something in return...

 

[epicstruggle]

Iranian student movements are calling for internal reform without US help.

I get a different picture from US news sources.

I thought the Iranian populace just wanted to have their rightfully elected leader actual lead and not the clerics(who have all the real power). I think this is the major difference with Iraq.

Iran has an elected govermnent that is for freedom and personal liberties. Where as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-KHAMENEI is elected for life by the Assembly of Experts and has the real power in Iran. If you could just get rid of the SL and the AofE then the real govermnent could rule the country.

anyways im tired and i hope this post makes sense after i get up.
later,
epic

 

[Willmeister]

A big component of this is that Iranians do not see their leadership as worthy. Former leader Rafsanjani was pretty much drummed out of office because his corruption was becoming a liability for the rest of the clerics. Rafsanjani is back from political irrelevence and has Bush to thank for it with his 'Axis of Evil' speech. It's rather obvious to anyone that the cleric leadership wants to have people 'do as they say, not do as they do.' So when Bush gets up and starts chastizing Iran, the Iranian people are (begrudgingly) rallying around the Ayatollah. The Iranians, like all others, eventually have to pick their poison.

If Bush really wants progress in Iran, he should just STFU.

Iran has an elected govermnent that is for freedom and personal liberties. Where as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-KHAMENEI is elected for life by the Assembly of Experts and has the real power in Iran. If you could just get rid of the SL and the AofE then the real govermnent could rule the country.

The only reason this council exists is because it was believed shortly after the Revolution that only a strong-willed person could have the power against outside influence. They were afraid that all the elected assembly people would be corrupted and lead to another mess.\

 

[Sazar]

I think what the Iraqis really want in the short term is for the electricity and water services to be fully reinstated as soon as possible.

From the reports I've seen, these basic parts of the infrastructure still haven't been repaired properly and this is why a great deal of the bad feeling against the Americans exists. I expect if I had been sweltering away in temperatures of 50 degrees celsius for months (about 120 fahrenheit) with water and electricity shortages, I wouldn't look too kindly upon my 'liberators' either!

Well not that I agree but many would argue WHY? How many countries EVER rebuilt a country right after they got done kicking their a$$?

The USA WILL rebuild Iraq just like we have done others (Germany,Japan,France). Hmmm.... It seems that the USA defeats all these countries and then rebuilds them to much better than they were before.

Heck, If I didn't live in the USA I would want my country to get attacked just so it could get rebuilt much better than it was before.

And then you have the ignorant Iraqs' (and other non-citizen extreme Islamics) that are sabotaging the work that the USA is rebuilding. Why? they are only hurting their own country/people. Damn that is stupid. Oh god, I think I am going to have an aneurysm.

you fail to take into account germany and japan SURRENDERED and the mindset of the people is a lot different than if they are invaded...

 

[Sazar]

just a couple of points...

logistically it is impossible for the US to attack iran unilaterally w/o significant displacement of troops in other areas such as s.korea/japan and the like...

the liklihood of international support is going to be less forthcoming than in the case with iraq... basically because once again the points are based on allegations... and the FACT is that north korea is in far clearer/more blatant violations and there is no serious action taking place on that front...

Iraq needs to be stabalised ASAP for loss of troops and civilian lives to be brought to a minimum and quality of life to return to even the levels it was @ during saddams reign...

personally speaking... it would appear if israel were located closer to north korea... action would have been more forthcoming there... but thats just IMO..

 

[pax]

Outright invasion is highly unlikely but air raids on the large facilities needed for a nuke program arent... Tho they can go underground it could push an Iranian nuke program back by decade or so as the Israelis noticed.

 

[Willmeister]

$50.00 says the Iranian leadership took pointers when Israel bombed Iraq's reactor in 1983. No doubt the Iranians have taken precautions, provided they really are after nuclear weaponry.

 

[Son Goku]

I've heard some people argue that the operation in Iraq was less of a war, and more of a masacre. The difference being whether the enemy has the military to fight back, or if they're easy prey. Consider that after 11 or 12 years of ecconomic sanctions, the dismantling of the military (which despite what George Bush suggested various UN weapons inspectors had reported that Heusein's weapons capability was destroyed in all essential ways, and most of the biological agents had a shelf life that would have rendered them useless by now anyway (even if he had managed to store some), and finally that all these supposed weapons of mass destruction have still not been found.

I guess one could relate this as a war that is somewhat one sided. A war with Iran however, would face a country that hasn't been under these same conditions for the past 11 years...

I have seen what Willmeister has indicated about internal developments in Iran, along with how the Jessica Lynch story might have been staged (even the ambulence that was returning her driven back by our troops so the Jessica Lynch story that followed could be packaged for our media viewing), among other things. The source is "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq" by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. I however have a statistics test which I need to head out to take now, so I can't search through the book to try to find the pages and the exact quote for the description of developments that had been occuring in Iran of their own accord, until after the war with Iraq helped give new support for the Ayotolah however.

 

[Son Goku]

I got home, and hadn't found the 2 things I mentioned (it is a 248 page book which I had read over a month ago), but I did find this bit, which some people might find interesting. It is concerning who funded Al Quida, and that there are in fact more links tieing Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks, then Iraq, and yet that members of the Bush administration, including the president's father George H. W. Bush has investement in Saudi oil. BTW, a couple weeks ago, I had the "pleasure" of hearing an interview on CNN where it was stated that there is no evidence that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks but essentially that the Bush administration bares no responsibility for the public having believed this (despite prior statements).

...The irony in all this, of course, is that 15 of the 19 hijackers who flew the planes on September 11 were Saudi citizens, and links between the Saudi regime and Al Qaeda are much easier to draw than links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden and his terror network belong to a specific Muslim doctrinal school, Wahhabi fundamentalism, which is much more ideologically severe than the religion practiced by most Muslims throughout the world and which certainly differs from the largely secular ideology of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party. However, Wahhabi provides the religious and ideological underpinnings of the absolute monarchy that rules Saudi Arabia with an iron fist...Partly as a release valve for domestic dissatisfaction with the oppressive nature of the Saudi regime, the monarchy tolerates and even encourages anti-Semitism and America-bashing that scapegoats Israel and the United States for all the problems of the region.

"It is worth stating clearly and unambiguously what official U.S. government spokespersons have not," stated "Terrorist financing," an October 2002 report sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. "For years, individuals and charities based in Saudi Arabia have been the most important source of funds for Al Qaeda, and for years the Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to this problem. This is hardly surprising since Saudi Arabia possesses the greatest concentration of wealth in the region; Saudi nationals and charities were previously the most important sources of funds for the mujahideen [Islamic fundamentalists who fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan]; Saudi nationals have consisted a disproportionate percentage of Al Qaeda's own membership, and Al Qaeda's political message has long focused on issues of particular interest to Saudi nationals, especially those who are disenchanted with their own government."

In fact, it appears that some of those Saudi officials did more than merely turn a blind eye. In November 2002, the FBI investigated charitable payments by Haifa Al-Faisal, the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Beginning in early 2000, $3,500 a month flowed from Al-Faisal to two Saudi students in the United States who provided assistance to some of the 9/11 hijackers. One of the students who received the money threw a welcoming party for the hijackers upon the arrival in San Diego, paid their rent and guarenteed their lease on an apartment next door to his own. The other student, a known Al Qaeda sympathizer, also befriended the hijackers prior to their awful deed. At a party after the attacks, he "celebrated the heoes of September 11," openly talking about "what a wonderful glorious day it had been."

Prince Haifa did not send money directly to the hijackers, and there is no evidence that she had any prior knowledge of their plans. Nevertheless, the Bush administration's willingness to accept her explanations at face value contrasts strikingly with the enthusiasm with which the Bush administration pursued every slim thread that might connect Iraq to Al Qaeda. It handled the news about Haifa Al-Faisal's payments by urging people not to jump to conclusions. White House spokesman Ari Fleicher responded to the news saying, "Saudi Arabia is a good partner in the war against terrorism but can do more."

Several investigators--including Joel Mowbray of the conservative National Review, leftist BBC reporter Greg Palast, and an investigative team at the Boston Herald--have found evidence of links between prominent Saudis and the financing of Al Qaeda. Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow in terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says that much of Al Qaeda's funding has come through charities "closely linked to the Saudi government and royal family," including the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, Benevolence International Foundation, International Islamic Relief Organization, Muslim World League, Rabita Trust, and World Assembly of Muslim Youth. A Canadian intelligence assessment prepared on July 24, 2002, reported that individuals in Saudi Arabia "were donating 1 to 2 million a month through mosques and other fundraising avenues."...

The list continues, but I think I have cited enough to make a case, even though it might not be one one has heard from Bush officials and on all the news about supposed "weapons of mass destruction" which never turned up thus far prior to going into Iraq. Sorry for the length, but a topic such as this, deserves supporting evidence, and not just a claim without any provided. And lest I be accused of not citing my source here It is Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq by Seldon Rampton and John Stauber, pages 101-104. In closing, and for a possible reason why the Saudis are stated to be our allies in the war on terror, even as we went to war with Iraq and possibly now Iran (even though the real links behind Al Quada, well see above) might have something to do with this.

...The U.S. barely whispered about this lack of cooperation, for fear of disrupting what Herald reporters Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers, and Maggie Mulvhill described as "an extraordinary array of U.S.-Saudi business ventures which, taken together, are worth tens of billions of dollars. They cited examples of top Bush officials who have "cashed in on [the] Saudi gravey train," including the following:

• Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, has done more than $174 million in business developing oil fields and other projects for the Saudis.
• National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice is a former longtime member of the board of directors for Chevron, which does extensive business with the Saudis. Rice even has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.
• The president's father, George H. W. Bush, works as a senior advisor to the Carlyle Group, which has financial interests in U.S. defense firms hired by the Saudis to equip and train their military.

...

Same book, pages 104-105. Remember, the above mentioned is concerning those whom the Bush administration calls our allies, even Iraq was suggested to be behind 9/11 and there is talk about a possible war with Iran.

 

[pax]

Not gonna be a war with Iran... And Iran isnt stupid enough to start one either. Not to mention the only major nation to support war with Iraq, the brits, have said things against another mideast war that would make the french blush. The US isnt gonna bulldoze thru the mideast before the next election what with the kind of bills the tax payer is seeing thrown his way for a nation the size of florida (population wise).

Big thing couple weeks ago tho was the move by the governig council to privatize evertying BUT the oil in Iraq BEFORE an election was held to legitimize such a broad decision with serious implications. They even privatized the water. Probly a test case for privatizing the oil. If they are insane enought to even try that before the election. They do that and Saddam (assuming he'll still be alive) will go from grossly unpopular to budding 'newcomer' in next years political debacles er I mean election.

Just saw dennis miller the raw feed. Man this guy made a 180 on his politics. Cept for social issues. And gun control. Heck im on the right to him of gun control. I kinda knew somthing was going on when on one of his last dennis miller live shows he threw out the rant that no palestinians lived in Israel pre 48 but had only moived there as the Israelis were moving in...

His latest tv special was worse than bill maher's... Brimming with ignorance... few more laughs than bill's tho but bill made more sense.

 

[archie4oz]

If Bush really wants progress in Iran, he should just STFU.

Outright invasion is highly unlikely but air raids on the large facilities needed for a nuke program arent... Tho they can go underground it could push an Iranian nuke program back by decade or so as the Israelis noticed.

Not likely... As was already mentioned they've probably already learned a thing or two from the Osirak raid. The more likely scenario is for the US to push for sanctions (since it's already been brought up by US officials as an option, if the Iranians don't cooperate). If in any case, an aggressive stance by the US will just give Iran more incentive to pull out of the NPT and give them carte blanche to pursue whatever they choose...

 

[pax]

Big hilly mountainous country. They can certainly try to hide. But maybe we've learned a trick or 2 too since 1981 in tracing down large underground complexes that hide large industrial facilities...

I agree tho we can just take a deep breathe and lie back on the western deterrent. I really dont see how we can worry about nations getting wmds... At least not in Iran's case. The leadership isnt insane...

 

[Postscript3]

If we are going to do it lets just get it done with. Why we spend time rebulding just doesn't make sense to me. The people that live there should rebuild not us. We freed them. Its up to them to make the most of that freedom. When we won or freedom no one came and rebuilt the u.s.a . We did it ourselves. Thats the problem today. Everyone expects us to get them out of a jam and then fix thier problem instead of doing it them selves .

Sounds very familiar. Kind of like AFGHANISTAN! Yeah, we helped out in the 80's. Liberated Afgh. from the USSR then left. What happened? Resentment at our leaving them in a shambles which led to our re-occupation of Afgh. So as not to make the same mistake we decide to mold Iraq after thier liberation from Saddam. Seems to me that the people that blamed 911 on the US because we LEFT Afghanistan in a shambles are the same people that are telling us to leave Iraq in a shambles.

 

[Vince]

And lest I be accused of not citing my source here It is Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq by Seldon Rampton and John Stauber, pages 101-104.

You have yet to read the ISG/Kay Report, huh? I'd suggest you do so (eg. read the whole thing, not the media's bullshit pg1 coverage) before speaking. Although, I must confess, your source, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, seems pretty non-biased and rectifiable to me.

 

[Willmeister]

Sounds very familiar. Kind of like AFGHANISTAN! Yeah, we helped out in the 80's. Liberated Afgh. from the USSR then left. What happened? Resentment at our leaving them in a shambles which led to our re-occupation of Afgh.

Well, it's not really resentment. You have to remember that many friendly Arab regimes basically forcefully drafted hardcore criminals and unwanted troublemakers held in their prisons to go off and fight in Afghanistan, complete with US funding. What happened after the USSR withdrew was simply a power vaccuum being filled by warlords. So, you basically had very religous people (Taliban) with guns fighting unreligious people (warlords) with guns. It's not 'resentment', it's survival and self-interest...

So as not to make the same mistake we decide to mold Iraq after thier liberation from Saddam. Seems to me that the people that blamed 911 on the US because we LEFT Afghanistan in a shambles are the same people that are telling us to leave Iraq in a shambles.

That's just one of the more convenient excuses. The whole Al Qaeda movement was largely born of a man named Sayyid Qatb, someone the Egyptians imprisoned (executed?) in the 1970s, and he himself was merely a result of colonial and absolutist rule. For that, a lot of our more modern troubles in the region flow... It's history catching up.

 

[Silent_One]

The whole Al Qaeda movement was largely born of a man named Sayyid Qatb, someone the Egyptians imprisoned (executed?) in the 1970s, and he himself was merely a result of colonial and absolutist rule.

The Philosopher of Islamic Terror
The New York Times
March 23, 2003

The organization was created in the late 1980's by an affiliation of three armed factions -- bin Laden's circle of ''Afghan'' Arabs, together with two factions from Egypt, the Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the latter led by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's top theoretician. The Egyptian factions emerged from an older current, a school of thought from within Egypt's fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the 1950's and 60's. And at the heart of that single school of thought stood, until his execution in 1966, a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb -- the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide...<snip>....The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists tried to cooperate with one another in Egypt in those days, and there was some basis for doing so. Both movements dreamed of rescuing the Arab world from the legacies of European imperialism. Both groups dreamed of crushing Zionism and the brand-new Jewish state. Both groups dreamed of fashioning a new kind of modernity, which was not going to be liberal and freethinking in the Western style but, even so, was going to be up-to-date on economic and scientific issues. And both movements dreamed of doing all this by returning in some fashion to the glories of the Arab past. Both movements wanted to resurrect, in a modern version, the ancient Islamic caliphate of the seventh century, when the Arabs were conquering the world.

The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists could be compared, in these ambitions, with the Italian Fascists of Mussolini's time, who wanted to resurrect the Roman Empire, and to the Nazis, who likewise wanted to resurrect ancient Rome, except in a German version. The most radical of the Pan-Arabists openly admired the Nazis and pictured their proposed new caliphate as a racial victory of the Arabs over all other ethnic groups. Qutb and the Islamists, by way of contrast, pictured the resurrected caliphate as a theocracy, strictly enforcing shariah, the legal code of the Koran. The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists had their similarities then, and their differences. (And today those two movements still have their similarities and differences -- as shown by bin Laden's Qaeda, which represents the most violent wing of Islamism, and Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which represents the most violent wing of Pan-Arabism.)

In 1952, in the days before staging his coup d'etat, Colonel Nasser is said to have paid a visit to Qutb at his home, presumably to get his backing. Some people expected that, after taking power, Nasser would appoint Qutb to be the new revolutionary minister of education. But once the Pan-Arabists had thrown out the old king, the differences between the two movements began to overwhelm the similarities, and Qutb was not appointed. Instead, Nasser cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, and after someone tried to assassinate him, he blamed the Brotherhood and cracked down even harder. Some of the Muslim Brotherhood's most distinguished intellectuals and theologians escaped into exile. Sayyid Qutb's brother, Muhammad Qutb, was one of those people. He fled to Saudi Arabia and ended up as a distinguished Saudi professor of Islamic Studies. Many years later, Osama bin Laden would be one of Muhammad Qutb's students.

But Sayyid Qutb stayed put and paid dearly for his stubbornness. Nasser jailed him in 1954, briefly released him, jailed him again for 10 years, released him for a few months and finally hanged him in 1966

 

[Willmeister]

I like the slander of the Pan-Arab nationalists. Truly unsurprising though. It's largely a common phenomena to take a few charged images or events to smear the entire group in order to draw popular domestic attention away from the grievances that spawn such movements. Pan-Arabists like Nasser were driven by the idea of recreating the region as a modern power in the model of the Westnern state. "If you can't beat 'em, might as well join 'em."

Sadly, it works very well even to this very day.

 

[Son Goku]

Actually I've been reading a fair amount on this. I only watched bits and pieces of the news during this whole push to war (enough to get a sence of what was being published in the media), though the PR and propaganda aspects were rather apparent. Hey, I took a course in the politics of public opinion a long time back (with a whole bunch of other political, legal, and other such courses) and to complete a major (actually in comp networking) need a communications class so taking one in mass media. Some things seem very apperent.

Instead of getting everything from the hard news, I got some, enough to get a sense of what they were saying, deconstruct it, and get a gist of the whole "agenda setting" involved, but was waiting for the more in-depth books to come out from various sources to get a more thorough idea of what is really going on. Weapons of Mass Deception was one of them. Currently reading a book on Bush's main political advisor (that didn't just leave after Bush took office, but is suggesting presidential policy and Bush is said to be clearing policy with him. Namely Karl Rove. This book is Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. I've read through the first 7 chapters, and enough to leave me with an impression that Karl Rove is arguably a complete amoralist. I have not gotten to the part on the Iraq strategy which emerged from the Bush administration, or Rove's suggested influence upon Bush's policy decisions in this regard. I can't comment there until I get to it, which looks to be Chapter 16, or "The Baghdad Road" based on the table of contents, and a brief purusal of the first couple of pages.

There's other things I've been reading to, though I have only so much time with my course schedule which includes learning Japanese and all. By comparison to my other classes, Japanese seems to be the one that takes time to learn.

 

[FoxDie]

NO WAR HERE!!!