http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/...eut/index.html

This time the Iranians has "test fired" a long range missle from a sumarine.

An Iranian admiral bragged We are inolved in Iraq thanks to W and we dis-stablized Iraq hense made Iran stronger in relatio to Iraq. Now that we are stretched out Iran is causing trouble and we may not be able to take them down.

Great work W just great work !!!!! You had us chasing non existing WMD and meanwhile them terrorists and "evil doers are still free, somewhere.

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"I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land" - Guess Who? You go it !

Yeah, that's a "sub-to-surface" missile - only problem is, the Iranian sub had to surface to fire it.

Plus, all their subs are notoriously noisy, they'd never get within a hundred miles of anyone's shoreline without someone noticing.

But still, the capability is noteworthy. It might give those nut-ball Neo-Cons something more to think about....

I don't think "we" have to seriously worry about the Iranian "big-mil" efforts. The real trouble there, is the people with the black hoods carrying machine guns and marching in lock-step.

This war, won't be like WW-2, when you could always more-or-less tell who your enemy was. Seems to me, this one will be more like the American Civil War, when you could never know if the guy next to you is a big-time Confederate arms merchant or money-guy (and it might even be your own brother, or close cousin, or whatever).

Surprise, surprise. Well, Bushie "had no idea", it seems, what kind of mess he was stepping into here. He should have stopped with Afghanistan, and then everyone would have called him a hero.

But now he's got Iraq - what do you think will happen if each of the three major factions there end up getting significant "aid" from neighboring nations? And the whole thing blows up into a huge regional war? Then, do you think anyone's going to care about Palestine anymore?

Well.... I have no doubt that the Pals will find a way to remind us they're still there.....

nonsqtr says Don't you think that this is not already happening !! Iran must be helping their faction in Iraq and "W" e made it all possible to happen.

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"I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land" - Guess Who? You go it !

Okay, you're up on the tech side but short on the strategy side. If you can find eleven fanatics willing to blow up three airplanes, you can find enough to crew what amounts to a kamikaze sub run.

We're more worried about undersea mapping by the Chinese, especially near the truly secure undersea cables we're not supposed to know about. It is relatively easy using Glomar Explorer style deep rigs to install a tap on a given cable, for re-transmission/decryption.

But generally you're right. Us "nut ball" CONSERVATIVES do think that. Not some neo-garbage the hair-splitters love to use trying to isolate us from them.

That was clearly anticipated in planning this war.


Here's where Bette Davis says fasten your seat belts, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

Until we could get Bolton into the UN it was unlikely we'd be able to justify going after Iran. We didn't have enough intel to avoid a Bay of Pigs against an enemy as I understand it was superior to Iraq in many if not most respects. They evidently didnt want that balance disturbed by one or the other becoming invaded by U.S.-led troops (much less UN). Keep the heat off Iranian nuke-production and then---but we cut it before "then." We got in and whacked Saddam's sons (the future terror) and put the old man up in a show trial, all well and good.

Where the libs don't get it is, now we have the option of forward deployment in two countries, a nice fallback in case one folds up and goes pro-terror again. It's nice to even triangulate your enemies, don't you agree? Makes for a cleaner strike in taking him out.

Considering Transjordan's treatment, no. The Pals are pawns and they are bitterly frustrated because they know it. They are the sacrificial sheep arabs allow to go get killed for overall muslim hatred, and leave the "innocent victims" to say they are "shocked beyond words at depraved Jewish violence."

Tough on the home team's survivors, but kamikaze stuff did get things done. Americans don't have that degree of duty, but when we do it is invariably for legitimate purposes. Here, though, manufactured martyrs are publicity victims---and know it.

Win-win from the supposedly neutral funding states like the Saudis. The Pals eat the blame and die like sheep. Jews are made to look bad defending their rightful homeland---and until Josh Bolton the UN glossed it as routine business. Nope. Not any more.

They will die---the majority by their own hand. That's way enough.

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Delivering tasty bite-sized Clues to liberals since 1965.

Good input, thanks.

Somehow though, I think your statement about the nature of this thing being "clearly anticipated" is... well, weak. (sorry, no offense intended, but let me tell you why I say that) -

Here's the way I'm seeing this thing now - "IF" as we're discussing, you see this battle having a "distributed" nature - with lots of marginally trained but fairly intelligent people on the ground (I'm talking about "them", not "us" ) - then it seems to me, we've already screwed the pooch.

Because "our" military, is different. We don't have thousands of little kids in Gaza riding around on motorcycles, reporting everyone's every move. We operate differently. Our people are highly trained, and they're "specialists", and it takes a fairly long time to make them effective as a group in a novel combat situation (despite Rummy's statements to the contrary). We operate on high-tech - our intelligence comes from satellites and things like that, and not from thousands of sympathetic spies on the ground.

That one very important difference, is huge. What it means, as you say, is that "they" can send one or two or fifty people on a makeshift kamikaze run, and do some serious damage. And that's exactly why we're seeing all this "monitoring" going on right now (of our phone calls and bank records and all that) - because that's how we "know" to respond - in other words, we think we can use this high-tech stuff to catch the proverbial needle in the haystack.

The problem is though, that there isn't just one needle. There are thousands upon thousands, and they're all ideologically committed, and they're perfectly willing to sit out a play to win the game.

This thing isn't going away anytime soon. How could it? And how are you going to ultimately "win" in a scenario like that - by dropping a nuke on Tehran? I think not. All that'll do is release the rest of the gnats in Cairo and Baghdad and wherever else they hang out.

See what I'm saying? It seems to me, that "our" strategy was ill-conceived to begin with. Yes we can "encircle Iran", as you suggest, but I really don't think that's going to win us the war, do you?

This thing has been developing for forty years at least, and if Tehran goes away tomorrow, the war doesn't end. It might get "delayed" a little, but I don't think you could say that we'd "won" in that case.

Where our current strategy is leading us, is into the same trap the Israelis have been in for quite a while now - ie they end up having to drop cluster-bombs on heavily-populated areas, and all that does is create more of the dangerous fanatics we're talking about.

And then, as if that weren't enough, there are several major players that have been sitting on the sidelines for a while, but are going to have to get into the game if and when it starts for real. I mean, I could think of all kinds of scenarios that would get Russia and China in a real tizzy, and that would definitely be trouble.

People keep talking about "regime change" in Iran, but my take is, it's too late for that. We mighta-coulda-done it under Reagan or Carter, but now.... doubtful. The idea "was", I think, that the Iranians would do it for themselves eventually, but now they've built up a whole lot of political capital on this thing, and they have allies in places that weren't even on the map forty years ago.

It seems to me, we're going about this all wrong. We for-sure don't want to fall into the Israeli trap - you can see for yourself how much good that's done them.

Really "winning" this thing (if there is such a concept), is going to take a lot smarter "strategy", as you say, than what we're doing now....

IMO and all that.