Possible war with Iran

• jhay78

  

  http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/280184/breaking-tehran-andrew-c-mccarthy
  

  The Islamic democracy project is nothing if not beguiling. From Clinton’s Orwellian &#8220eace process” through Bush’s cloying “freedom agenda” to Obama’s contortion of an Islamist ascendancy into “the Arab Spring,” the dream teems with self-congratulation, so much so that its debilitating downsides go unseen and unaddressed. Thanks to the Islamic Republic of Iran, that situation has just gone from dangerously delusional to dangerous, period.
  
  The list of downsides is long. There is the rudimentary problem that democracy promotion does not work. As a national-security strategy, it is irrelevant to our threat environment.
  
  Yes, democratic nations tend to avoid war with each other. If al-Qaeda were Afghanistan, it might make sense to spend tenfold Afghanistan’s GDP to drag it kicking and Allahu-akbaring 14 centuries forward. But principles fit for sovereign states are inapposite when it comes to global terror networks. The latter have no incentive to secure citizens and territory; for them, democratic freedoms are not values to be cherished but weapons to be exploited. To plot their gruesome business, Mohamed Atta & Co. found democracy in Hamburg, Madrid, Scottsdale, and Venice, Fla., perfectly suitable.
  Then there is the unwelcome fact that promoting Western democracy in Islamic lands actually increases the threat to us. This owes to our enemies’ animating ideology — the one doctrine that gets even less scrutiny than that of democracy promotion.
  
  Under sharia, the law of Islam, non-Muslim forces that occupy Muslim territory must be attacked until they are driven out. It makes no difference that the non-Muslims believe they are engaged in a humanitarian effort to make life better for Muslims. In Muslim lands, Islamic doctrine holds that sharia is to be regarded as the supreme law, and it is a code that rejects core democratic principles, including the foundational conceits that people are free, equal, and at liberty to enact the laws of their choosing, irrespective of sharia.
  
  Consequently, the sowing of Western ideas and institutions in Islamic soil is perceived as a hostile act by the Muslim mainstream — strong majorities of which desire to live under sharia. That is why, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood’s influential jurisprudent, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, issued a fatwa calling for jihad against American personnel in Iraq. It is why, far from being grateful for our sacrifices, Iraqis say they want us out of their country yesterday. It is why al-Qaeda built a strong regional following when its signal cause was driving U.S. forces out of Saudi Arabia — in accordance with Koranic scripture, non-Muslims are deemed unfit to set foot in Mecca and Medina.
  
  There is also the perverse manner in which democracy promotion degrades democracy overseas and at home. Because Muslim countries do not want Western democracy, we have to inject it with sharia to carry the charade off. As a member of any persecuted minority in Iraq or Afghanistan might tell you, that is like injecting Superman with kryptonite. Meanwhile, in our own country, we are told the charade’s “success” requires the steady abrasion of our free-expression rights, lest the resulting slights to tender Muslim sensibilities — and sharia’s strict ban on negative critiques of Islam — engulf our troops and our homeland in reactionary violence.
  
  Nevertheless, today’s most pressing challenge stems not from these consciously avoided perils of the freedom agenda, but from another.
  
  For several years, I’ve contended that democracy promotion’s steepest downside would be the dissolution of our will to defend the United States from a determined enemy. As the American people became inured to the new calculus — that victory is no longer our goal, that destroying enemies who endanger us is no longer sufficient, and that the price-tag of our security now includes spending thankless years, unrecoverable billions of dollars, and the precious lives of our best young people in rebuilding the aggressor nation — they would resist actions vital to their own security.
  
  We are there.
  
  Iran’s sharia state has been killing and plotting to kill Americans for more than 30 years. Critics who see that observation as war-mongering repeat the folly that gave us 9/11: When the other side is already at war with you, you cannot make the war go away by ignoring it — that only emboldens the enemy. I don’t want war with Iran. I want to win the war Iran has instigated.
  It was revealed this week that the Iranian regime plotted to murder the Saudi ambassador to the United States — inside our country and in a plot that blithely assumed scores of Americans would be collaterally killed. The Iranian-American dual citizen at the center of the scheme has been arrested. But this is an act of war, not a crime.
  
  It is one thing to pretend that a jihadist campaign by a sub-sovereign terror network is just a crime spree for which trial in the civilian justice system is an adequate response. Iran, however, is a state actor — not even arguably amenable to court prosecution. A state aggressor must get a political response, not a legal one. There is a range of possible political responses, of course, but given its three-decade campaign of aggression, the response to Iran must be military — and decisive. The regime must be destroyed.
  Iran proclaimed its war against the United States in 1979. Ever since then, “Death to America” has been its unceasing battle cry. Its forward terrorist militia, Hezbollah, has killed hundreds of American military and intelligence personnel. The mullahs have been training and arming al-Qaeda since the early 1990s.
  In 1996, the regime orchestrated the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 members of our Air Force. The 9/11 Commission found “strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al-Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11,” including “future 9/11 hijackers”; its report adds that senior Hezbollah commanders actually accompanied these future hijackers on some of these transit flights — although our government has studiously resisted probing whether Iran was directly complicit in the slaughter of almost 3,000 Americans or whether this was just, as the commission put it, “a remarkable coincidence.” What is certain, though, is that the regime gave al-Qaeda operatives safe haven when our armed forces were unleashed to attack their Afghan sanctuary in late 2001. As our generals have repeatedly acknowledged, Iran supplies and directs terror cells in Afghanistan and Iraq that target American troops. No surprise there: Iran has long been the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
  
  In the greater scheme of Iranian atrocities, the affront revealed this week is comparatively tame. Nevertheless, it is a deadly serious continuation of the jihad. A host nation’s obligation to protect foreign diplomats is essential to peace, commerce, and stability. To attack foreign diplomats has thus, for centuries, been deemed a heinous violation of the law of nations. Iran obviously seeks to destabilize relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia, against both of which it fights proxy wars through the terror factions it commands.
  
  The recently thwarted plot was choreographed by the Quds (Jerusalem) Force, an especially lethal component of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Quds Force reports directly to Iran’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In an intriguing twist, Claudia Rosett points out that the objective may have been to have the Saudi ambassador rubbed out in late September, while the regime’s mouthpiece, Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was in New York for his annual rant at the U.N. And as Michael Ledeen observes, the regime’s attempt to conduct an attack on our soil does not — as some claim — raise Iranian audacity to a new threshold of brazenness: Tehran’s agents have been surreptitiously operating here for years, harassing dissidents and quite likely arming jihadists.
  
  Almost all the attention and diplomatic energy futilely devoted to Iran in recent years has centered on its nuclear program — to the exclusion of its terrorist aggression and the savagery by which it notoriously represses its citizens. Indeed, the dispersal of its nuclear installations in numerous secret, fortified locations throughout its territory is the ever-ready rationalization for refraining from military action: “We can’t count on destroying all the sites,” the explanation goes, “so what’s the point of trying?”

• jhay78

  

  Rest of the article:
  

  The point is that the problem isn’t the nukes, it’s the regime — and while there may be many sites, there is only one regime. Take the regime out, eliminate the world’s most destabilizing and incorrigibly evil force, and the challenge of Iran’s weapons program would get a lot easier. So would such challenges as the future of Iraq; the ground beneath Syria’s execrable Assad regime; and the supply lines of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and the mullahs’ other clients.
  
  Most significant, gone would be today’s worst threat to American national security — a threat that will become only more dire if these rabid, desperate men are permitted to become a nuclear power. That is an eventuality that will come about in short order if we fail to act. It is an eventuality that we should find unacceptable, as this week once again demonstrated. And it can be stopped only by military force; other options have been exhausted, and they only vex the mullahs — they don’t stop them. Yet, war-weary Americans seem, even now, to have no stomach for transitioning from toothless “unacceptable” rhetoric to purposeful action to prevent the allegedly unacceptable. In truth, however, we’re not war-weary. We’re freedom-agenda weary. We don’t want another “You break it, you own it” lecture — as if it were an ironclad rule that attacking America somehow obliges us to fix your dysfunctional country. We don’t want to be in Tehran for a decade or two, spending another trillion or so to build a sharia-lite “democracy” that ends up despising us. We don’t want to sacrifice any more young men and women to the thankless task of tip-toeing through the IEDs to protect warring Muslims from each other.
  
  All fair enough. Still, none of it changes the key facts on the ground: Iran is at war with us, and the longer we ignore it the more difficult it will become to do what needs doing. Millions of Iranians are already struggling to overthrow the tyrants, and if we’d given them the right kind of encouragement, they might have accomplished that by now. They are a proud and sophisticated people, with a rich history and their own ideas about what comes after the Khomeini nightmare. We don’t have to own Iran just because we have to break it. But we do have to break it.

  Makes several good points about Iran. Not sure I agree with all of it, but Iran (their regime, not their people) has been getting away with too much for too long.
• I Wear Pants

  Anyone who thinks military action against Iran is a good idea is a moron or has motives that aren't pure. There is absolutely no right or reason for us to go into Iran.
• BGFalcons82

  

  I Wear Pants;937526 wrote:Anyone who thinks military action against Iran is a good idea is a moron or has motives that aren't pure. There is absolutely no right or reason for us to go into Iran.

  Not to worry. The assassinator-in-chief has already laid the groundwork for a drone assault on Tehran and their nuke facilities in the deserts by announcing and politicizing the plans for Iran to murder the Saudi ambassador here in the States. For the, "Bush Lied People Died" crowd, I wonder how radically different this scenario is from the Iraq War pre-conflict days? It will be interesting to see if the hardcore Left turns as viciously on their annointed one as hard as they went after GWB.
• I Wear Pants

  BGFalcons82;937599 wrote:Not to worry. The assassinator-in-chief has already laid the groundwork for a drone assault on Tehran and their nuke facilities in the deserts by announcing and politicizing the plans for Iran to murder the Saudi ambassador here in the States. For the, "Bush Lied People Died" crowd, I wonder how radically different this scenario is from the Iraq War pre-conflict days? It will be interesting to see if the hardcore Left turns as viciously on their annointed one as hard as they went after GWB.

  If we go into Iran I will be very pissed at Obama. So will most of the other people I know who are displeased with our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the military front Obama has been essentially a continuation of Bush.
• Fab1b

  

  Why not be pissed at Obama already? He hasn't said what he said he was going to do concerning the two wars. He has used the same Bush tactics to kill and spy on terrorists that he criticized Bush for! On and on and on.....
• I Wear Pants

  Fab1b;937633 wrote:Why not be pissed at Obama already? He hasn't said what he said he was going to do concerning the two wars. He has used the same Bush tactics to kill and spy on terrorists that he criticized Bush for! On and on and on.....

  I meant an additional pissing would be had in regards to his military policies.
• majorspark

  

  I would not worry about Iran. Pakistan first. Plus they already got nukes.
  
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/8834040/US-forces-massing-on-Afghanistan-Pakistan-border.html
• I Wear Pants

  God damn it.
• j_crazy

  

  At least Pakistan is attacking us.
• Footwedge

  jhay78;936544 wrote:Rest of the article:
  
  
  
  Makes several good points about Iran. Not sure I agree with all of it, but Iran (their regime, not their people) has been getting away with too much for too long.

  The National Review pounded the exact same war drums regarding Iraq in 01. Almost word for word. "Nuclear threat", "WMD".
  "imminent threat". How'd that work out for us?
  
  The National Review needs to understand that lying about these things and fear mongering are soooo last century...and the American people are not as gullible these days.
• Footwedge

  j_crazy;937993 wrote:At least Pakistan is attacking us.

  Huh? Excuse me? What American city did Pakistan invade?
  
  Obama is a fuggin sick bastard when it comes to all of his wars.
• BGFalcons82

  

  Footwedge;938263 wrote:The National Review pounded the exact same war drums regarding Iraq in 01. Almost word for word. "Nuclear threat", "WMD".
  "imminent threat". How'd that work out for us?
  
  The National Review needs to understand that lying about these things and fear mongering are soooo last century...and the American people are not as gullible these days.

  My point EXACTLY! Thanks for noticing. :thumbup:
  
  As far as the people not being gullible these days....that's how the current occupier of the White House got his job.
• stlouiedipalma

  Let's see, does Obama have a personal grudge against Iran? Not that I know of.
  At least they haven't tried to whack his daddy.
  
  
  Does Obama have any multinational company he wants to make even richer by allowing them to get choice contracts (without bids) in an upcoming war?
  Nah, I don't see any Haliburton in his back pocket pulling the strings.
  
  
  From where I stand there are no circumstances similar at all to the last Republican to send us to war. I therefore conclude that, absent any personal vendettas or get-rich schemes, we will not be going to war with Iran.
  
  I know it really hurts all of you righties out there that we will soon be without any wars to fight. It could mean that the time is right for another Republican in the White House. I can just see the slogans..."Vote for me...I'll see to it that your sons and daughters die overseas for absolutely no good reason."
• majorspark

  

  stlouiedipalma;943107 wrote:I know it really hurts all of you righties out there that we will soon be without any wars to fight. It could mean that the time is right for another Republican in the White House. I can just see the slogans..."Vote for me...I'll see to it that your sons and daughters die overseas for absolutely no good reason."

  You might want to review your history. Democrat presidents have started and engaged in foreign wars as well. If you want to count dead sons and daughters in foreign lands democrat presidents got that hands down. Both parties have blood on their hands.
• dwccrew

  

  stlouiedipalma;943107 wrote:Let's see, does Obama have a personal grudge against Iran? Not that I know of.
  At least they haven't tried to whack his daddy.
  
  
  Does Obama have any multinational company he wants to make even richer by allowing them to get choice contracts (without bids) in an upcoming war?
  Nah, I don't see any Haliburton in his back pocket pulling the strings.
  
  
  From where I stand there are no circumstances similar at all to the last Republican to send us to war. I therefore conclude that, absent any personal vendettas or get-rich schemes, we will not be going to war with Iran.
  
  I know it really hurts all of you righties out there that we will soon be without any wars to fight. It could mean that the time is right for another Republican in the White House. I can just see the slogans..."Vote for me...I'll see to it that your sons and daughters die overseas for absolutely no good reason."

  LOL at the revisionist's history.
  
  I guess Wilson, FDR, Truman and LBJ were all Republicans.
• majorspark

  

  dwccrew;943217 wrote:LOL at the revisionist's history.
  
  I guess Wilson, FDR, Truman and LBJ were all Republicans.

  Don't forget about James K Polk in the Mexican American war. Manifest destiny was a staple of the democrat party.
• believer

  

  dwccrew;943217 wrote:LOL at the revisionist's history.
  
  I guess Wilson, FDR, Truman and LBJ were all Republicans.

  Don't forget JFK and Clinton.
  
  I always chuckle when the kool-aid drinking Dems pretend that only Repub presidents get us into wars. As Major pointed out BOTH parties have blood on their hands.
• Cleveland Buck

  

  Afghanistan to back Pakistan if wars with U.S.: Karzai
  
  Sat Oct 22, 2011 11:13am EDT
  
  ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Afghanistan would support Pakistan in case of military conflict between Pakistan and the United States, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in an interview to a private Pakistani TV channel broadcast on Saturday.

  http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/22/us-pakistan-afghanistan-usa-idUSTRE79L19Z20111022?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
  
  Luckily these countries are grateful when we "liberate" them.
• iclfan2

  

  Cleveland Buck;943596 wrote:http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/22/us-pakistan-afghanistan-usa-idUSTRE79L19Z20111022?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
  
  Luckily these countries are grateful when we "liberate" them.

  I tried posting a topic on this the other day. Bring all troops home from Afghanistan and let the damn hajis kill each other. If you are ungrateful for our help then F off.
• majorspark

  

  I'd give Karzai 3-6 months after the last American boot leaves that rat hole until he is found hiding in a drainage pipe, has a rifle muzzle shoved up his ass, then finished with a bullet in the brain, and placed in the local meat locker for the nut kooks to fawn over.
• BGFalcons82

  

  majorspark;944213 wrote:I'd give Karzai 3-6 months after the last American boot leaves that rat hole until he is found hiding in a drainage pipe, has a rifle muzzle shoved up his ass, then finished with a bullet in the brain, and placed in the local meat locker for the nut kooks to fawn over.

  It will be known as being, "Qaddhafied"
• I Wear Pants

  majorspark;943228 wrote:Don't forget about James K Polk in the Mexican American war. Manifest destiny was a staple of the democrat party.

  And was one of the worst things we've ever done.
• majorspark

  

  I Wear Pants;944295 wrote:And was one of the worst things we've ever done.

  The Mexican American war was an officially declared war as laid out by the constitution. Arguably with in the context of "common defense" as hostile forces were operating in mass on and with in our borders. We admitted a state that had a known border conflict with Mexico. Texas needed the Union to secure their defense. A free sovereign state joining with a Union of other free sovereign states. All states knew the baggage Texas would bring when they chose to admit them to the Union. By contract all states in the Union would have to join in their defense if congress called them to war. And so congress declared it. And the states stood by the contract.
  
  Securing the continuity of the continent has kept it at relative peace as compared to other fractious continents over similar periods of history. We had our war between the states that sought divison. The sovereign states that wanted to force the Union contract won. Since then from the Atlantic to the Pacific this continent has not known war within its borders (except for mop up Indian operations). Had the southern states won that would likely not be the case. Especially with the disputed western territories and the gold rush.
  
  That said I see the mutual defense benefits of the Union. But if the federal government wants to operate outside the constitution as it has for decades and wants to micromanage my state and my locality. And I see my president saying things like, "If they (congress) will not act, I will", then I want no part of that. We can go our separate ways.
• I Wear Pants

  majorspark;944415 wrote:The Mexican American war was an officially declared war as laid out by the constitution. Arguably with in the context of "common defense" as hostile forces were operating in mass on and with in our borders. We admitted a state that had a known border conflict with Mexico. Texas needed the Union to secure their defense. A free sovereign state joining with a Union of other free sovereign states. All states knew the baggage Texas would bring when they chose to admit them to the Union. By contract all states in the Union would have to join in their defense if congress called them to war. And so congress declared it. And the states stood by the contract.
  
  Securing the continuity of the continent has kept it at relative peace as compared to other fractious continents over similar periods of history. We had our war between the states that sought divison. The sovereign states that wanted to force the Union contract won. Since then from the Atlantic to the Pacific this continent has not known war within its borders (except for mop up Indian operations). Had the southern states won that would likely not be the case. Especially with the disputed western territories and the gold rush.
  
  That said I see the mutual defense benefits of the Union. But if the federal government wants to operate outside the constitution as it has for decades and wants to micromanage my state and my locality. And I see my president saying things like, "If they (congress) will not act, I will", then I want no part of that. We can go our separate ways.

  I don't see why you brought up the Civil War.
  
  And would you be okay if say California started to rebel and China annexed it? Because that's what started the hostilities with Mexico. We annexed what was part of their country. Then we invaded them because we had some God given right to after they got pissed about it. Lincoln didn't approve of it. Neither did Thoreau or John Quincy.