- I hope President George Bush will not be so stupid as
to allow the Israelis to push him into an attack on Iran. Based on his
past performance, however, I'm not sure what he will do.
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- Washington today is so riddled with intellectual dishonesty,
you have to take what officials say with a large dose of salt. The statement
"We have no plans to attack Iran" can mean nothing more than
we haven't made that decision yet or we don't have plans to attack this
week, but we do intend to attack by April.
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- The Pentagon, by the way, probably has had contingency
plans for an attack for who knows how long. That's part of its job. It
probably has contingency plans to attack a lot of countries. The point
is that the military plans, but the decisions are made by politicians.
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- If we do attempt to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, it
should provide a good test of Russia's air defense system, a version of
which the Russians have sold and installed in Iran. It will be interesting
to see how well it works though not, of course, for our pilots.
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- Given the enormous trouble Iraq and Afghanistan are giving
us, it seems to me that it would be moronic to add an enemy of 70 million
people to our list of unresolved military conflicts. An attack by America
will, of course, cut the feet off of all Iranian reformers. Under attack,
Iranians will rally around their leaders, just as human beings have been
doing for centuries.
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- Another strategic problem worth worrying about is the
Bush administration's push to build and install an anti-ballistic missile
system. The administration claims it is for defense against rogue states
like Iran. The Russians and probably the Chinese see it differently.
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- They see the anti-ballistic system as a first-strike
weapon. The system would be helpless against a launch of Russian missiles,
but if a U.S. first strike could take out many of the Russian missiles,
then the ABM system could so thin the surviving missiles that American
officials might well be tempted to start a nuclear war. That's why Russia
is upset with plans to put components of the system in Eastern Europe.
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- Never forget that intelligent military planners must
disregard intentions and concentrate on capabilities. Intentions can change
in minutes; capabilities cannot. So, if the U.S. deploys an ABM system
that provides the capability to launch a first strike, the Russian planners
will have to consider that as a fact and react accordingly. It is an exceedingly
dangerous ploy by the president, not to mention an enormously expensive
one.
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- As for Iraq, keep in mind the ABCs of guerrilla warfare.
If we do, in fact, deploy all those additional troops to Baghdad (and that's
not yet a certainty), the guerrillas will go to ground and simply wait
us out or shift their attacks to other parts of the country. That's how
it's always been when irregular forces are confronted by superior conventional
power. Our own George Washington learned that lesson and became a master
of retreating to prevent the British from destroying his army and the revolution.
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- Naturally, American officials will trumpet a great triumph
and proclaim that the light at the end of the tunnel radiates from a glorious
liberal democratic future for Iraq. That will be a load of horse apples.
Iraq is so impoverished, so riddled by corruption and incompetence, so
full of vicious sectarian strife, that the best the Iraqi people can hope
for is a benign dictator.
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- Unfortunately, the Middle East produces oil, dates, olives
and pistachio nuts in abundance, but has so far been mighty short of benign
dictators. Well, we've been awfully short on smart leaders. Maybe the whole
human race is in decline.
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