Invading Iran with The Bomb
In light of the current GOP implosion ongoing in the House of Representatives, it's important to look a few moves ahead on the chessboard. While I'm all for keeping the pressure on every blessed Republican CongressCritter to denounce not only Foley but the House Leadership as well, we need to be mindful of what the neo-con nuts in Cheney's office might be doing now to correct the situation.
What scares the bejeebus out of me is that they're probably dusting off the invasion plans for Iran.
I'm currently reading Vali Nasr's book, The Shia Revival, and his descripiton of the behavior of Iranian Army during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s is worth noting here:
Convinced of the religious significance of their sacrifice, the volunteers launched human-wave attacks by eht tens of thousands. Empty-handed, they confounded the Iraqi army's conventional tactics by using their bodies to set off mines and even to swarm Iraqi tanks or overrun Iraqi gun positions. Young Iranian men died by the hundreds of thousands, but in the end they forced Saddam's army off their soil. Pure willingness to die had matched the military superiority of the Iraqi army. The volunteers fought for nation but for faith--or perhaps it would be better to say that they made no distinction between the two. They were sentinels of the Twelfth Imam, and to them the war was a spiritual as well as a physical fight.
When I read this paragraph, I was shaken by two historical parallels. The first goes back to American History classes in grammar school, when teachers told us that Truman used atomic weapons against Japan in World War II because a conventional attack would encounter such fierce resistance that it would take a year and cost a million American lives.
The second parallel was from my college years. We used to play a lot of board wargames in those days (late 1970s), and several of them had the theme of a Soviet invasion of Europe. These games always forced the NATO player into the decision of whether or not to use chemical or nuclear weapons against the Warsaw Pact. Faced with overwhelming offensive forces, a few tactical nukes would slow down the Soviet onslaught. There were usually no strategic consequences to using battlefield nukes--the player could use them without the concern of nuclear escalation.
If the Iranians resisted the Iraqis with that much passion, just imagine how they'll behave against the army of the "Great Satan." It sounds like the sort of campaign that will take a long time and cost many, many American lives. If the Iranians were to turn and attack into Afghanistan or into Iraq, they may turn loose the faithful in the same manner.
For a neocon looking down at the Risk board, a nuclear option against Iran looks pretty good. After all, it's the best way to preempt waves of bodies coming at your troops. But the real world isn't a board wargame. Use of nuclear weapons has both regional and global consequences. If we nuke Iranians, will Pakistan turn a blind eye to the plight of a mostly-Shia army, or will pan-Islamic sentiments overcome them? How will other nuclear powers such as China react to our use of nukes?
If you think these madmen in the Bush Administration didn't think through the consequences of overthrowing the government of Iraq, the notion of them trying to wag-the-dog in Iran just to shake off FoleyGate should scare you to death.