Bush is going to have a real big problem getting around the military if he still plans to go to war, no matter what the scenario. Admiral Fallon is on record as saying that there will be no war on his watch. The Air Force might be all fired up to shock & awe another non-threatening country but the US Navy is a different story. For one thing they are incredibly vulnerable to anti-ship cruise missiles while in the Persian Gulf, because Iran has a whole lot of mobile launched Mach 3 ship killers that the navy has zero defense against if forced to fight inside the Gulf. Google "millenium challenge 2002" and read up on how the Navy could lose 3/4 of the Fifth Fleet to ship-killer missiles. It ain't pretty. And there are many other problems such as Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz and watch what happens to oil prices and the economy.

Posted at December 4, 2007 9:47 PM in response to NeoCons Go Ballistic on Iran NIE

Gettysburg,
There is a major difference between the two World Wars you cite and the present conflicts in the ME. The US was fighting to defend itself and other Western democracies against an imperialistic Germany in WW l, and worldwide fascism in WW ll. Iraq was a war of choice, an invasion of a country that posed zero threat to the US, but was a fixation of the Likud's & neo-con's and and benefited Israel, or at least that was the idea. Unfortunately, chickenhawks make lousy aggressors and occupiers and Iraq is now a full scale civil war. Lebanon is Israel's path to Iran & Syria, the other fixations of Likud, and if you are the student of history you say you are, you have got to acknowledge the pattern here. If you are not a neo-con, you are carrying water for them, and none of this has any benefit to the US. All this conflict will accomplish is a further isolation of the US by the EU, Russia, and China. We are the bully, the superpower gone power mad, and the rest of the world does not share your opinions about the benefits of ME conflicts on western economies.

Posted at July 15, 2006 4:35 PM in response to Israel Takes A Stupid Pill

Gettysburg,
If you really believe that an all out war in the Middle East will somehow benefit the US than you are living in a fantasy world. The disruption of oil supplies alone is enough to push our foreign oil dependent energy sector into hyper-inflation. It's bad enough that our cowboy president won't put the brakes on an Israeli prime minister with no military training, sorta like W himself, and keeps repeating AIPAC's mantra, "Self defense trumps the Geneva Convention, and every one knows that Israeli lives are worth much more than Arabs lives"; but to see a recent college grad spouting the neo-con party line is pretty sad. You call yourself a Libertarian, but your statement above is far right GOP/Likud. Even your choice of screen name suggests a glorification of war.

Posted at July 15, 2006 3:14 PM in response to Israel Takes A Stupid Pill

The following is from an article in the Washington Post on Feb 17, 2002. It talks about Dubai's financing of Al Qaeda and the methods used. The main method is the hawala network, which involves no written records and is often traded in untraceable gold. This is why Dubai Ports World cannot be allowed to run our ports. Here's the link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22303-2002Feb16?language=printer 

<U.S. investigators acknowledge they have been slow to focus on the trail of gold and the hawala network. While a handful of investigators had been urging that more attention be paid to those areas, they were largely ignored because the concepts are so foreign to the Western way of doing business, current and former officials said.

Wechsler, the former National Security Council official, said that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence know "virtually nothing" about how the hawala system operates and its relationship to gold.

"We don't know where the hawalas are, we don't even have an order of magnitude on how much money they move," Wechsler said. "We don't know how much it costs to be bin Laden. All I can say is, it costs millions and millions of dollars.">

Posted at February 22, 2006 2:22 AM in response to if the d's can't stop port offshoring, then

If Whittington was hit by some 200 pellets as reported in Austin there is no way in hell Cheney shot him from 30 yards away. It makes no sense. A shotgun charge starts expanding as soon as it leaves the barrel and by the time its out to thirty yards the pattern could be from 4 to 8 feet in diameter, unless he was using a fully choked barrel and hunting quail with full choke is not very rewarding unless the object is to disintegrate the bird. So how do you figure out the truth? First, Cheney lies so often that anything he says is suspect, and second, if Whittington was hit by over 200 pellets, some so deeply imbedded that the surgeon was afraid to go after them it seems almost impossible that the thirty yard figure is correct. The police weren't there, they just wrote down what the Secret Service told them to write down. The Secret Service is not going to embarass Cheney, but I'm sure they will lie for him. I vote for thirty feet, not thirty yards.

Posted at February 13, 2006 7:21 PM in response to VP Cheney, You're Lucky Those Reporters Aren't Hunters

Great ideas. But how do you get a Congress that cares more about partisan politics than about the future of our democracy to vote for their own funerals?The Republican majority is NOT going to cross Bush as long as Rove is around with his blacklisting and blackmailing tactics. He and Cheney are the real problem. Neither has any scruples, ethics or any moral standards. The only thing that gets through to guys like them is a bigger stick, and I don't see one lying around. Maybe after the 2006 elections if Dems can get a majority in one or both houses, but until then we're screwed. I expect to wake up one morning in the not so distant future to find out we just nuked Iran.

Posted at February 7, 2006 5:09 PM in response to WHAT WE HEARD FROM THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

Supuri,What have you got against Hugo Chavez? As far as I can tell he is doing more for Venezuela than any president they've ever had, and better than any Prez we've had since FDR.

Posted at February 7, 2006 4:57 PM in response to WHAT WE HEARD FROM THE ATTORNEY GENERAL