US Gov't claims to have proof if Iranian atacks against US

[ballz2wallz]

Originally Posted by motivez

That's ridiculous. It's this type of rush to judgment that got us into the situation we're in right now in Iraq.

15 yrs was a rush?

[DosEquis]

I think this is further proof we need to employ the strategy of placing our soldiers on the borders and letting the 200,000 Iraqi police and military secure baghdad. This will prevent weapons smuggling and possible even catch them in the act. Instead we just have to speculate and hope we don't make fools of ourselves.....again.

[motivez]

15 years what? Iraq has never posed the kind of threat to the United States to justify or warrant the actions we took.. not 15 years ago, not 10, and not the day before the invasion began.

[ballz2wallz]

Originally Posted by DosEquis

I think this is further proof we need to employ the strategy of placing our soldiers on the borders and letting the 200,000 Iraqi police and military secure baghdad. This will prevent weapons smuggling and possible even catch them in the act. Instead we just have to speculate and hope we don't make fools of ourselves.....again.

I don't mind this idea.

[motivez]

Originally Posted by DosEquis

I think this is further proof we need to employ the strategy of placing our soldiers on the borders and letting the 200,000 Iraqi police and military secure baghdad.

Yep. But you'd have to be willing to admit that the current strategy is a colossal failure for that to happen.. and admit that the Democrats had a decent suggestion.

Doubt that's going to happen as long as Bush is in office.

[ballz2wallz]

Originally Posted by motivez

15 years what? Iraq has never posed the kind of threat to the United States to justify or warrant the actions we took.. not 15 years ago, not 10, and not the day before the invasion began.

15 yrs of trying to get him to cooperate with the rest of the world, just like you're suggesting we do with Iran. It didn't work with Iraq, what makes you think Iran will work with anybody else?

[motivez]

Because Iraq was contained. I mean, just a year or so before we invaded Iraq for being a "grave threat" and yadda yadda, Colin Powell and the rest of the Administration was talking about just how contained Saddam was.

Diplomacy isn't easy, and it's not fast, but it saves lives. We've seen what diplomatic pressure can do by looking at the internal debate going in Iran related to Ahmadinejad's support.

If we drop a bomb on Iran, the country will rally around the idea of defending against an external threat. He will solidify the support of the entire nation like we saw happen to Bush's approval rating after 9/11, and then instead of being on the margins of Iranian society, his ideas will become mainstream and have tremendous backing.

It would be a mistake. A huge one.

However, if we continue diplomatic pressure there's a good chance of succeeding without unneeded bloodshed. We have not even begun to exhaust the diplomatic options we have available to us.

A rush to war is completely the wrong choice here for very obvious reasons. One only need look at the history of our involvement with Iran and the outcome of those situations to see what the result will be.

[RMNIXON]

I think this thread is getting a little off track here. Your talking politics but not the nature of Intelligence. I understand being skeptical. You have a bad track record in Iraq to back you up. But this is not the same type of evidence as Iraq WMD. That evidence was based on what we knew they had as of the Gulf War, and whatever types of Human Intelligence and satelites looking at trucks and installations from the air. That and the games being played with UN inspectors. In short it was almost all circumstantial evidence and which can add up wrong. But in this case we have physical evidence you can work with. The only question is how good a case you can make that it came from Iran? But that is much more solid that just human sources saying Iran is doing this. I doubt the administration would risk sticking its neck out if it did not have a very good case. The political risk would be too great.

[DosEquis]

I would only subscribe to military action against Iran IF:

We secure Iraq's borders
We caught Iranians smuggling these weapons
We do it with a real coalition of the willing
We do not send forces across their border in an invasion

I would also say the same for Syria. Any weapons smuggling into Iraq to attack our soldiers is an attack against us and warrants a response.

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by motivez

Yeah, like how they had "proof" of WMD's, portable weapons labs, ties to Al Qaeda, etc... Slam dunk, right?

I'm very very skeptical of this. There's going to need to be *much* more evidence than this if they want to justify attacking Iran.. even if the arms come from Iran, they're going to need to show some sort of proof that the government was involved at a level that can't be held accountable without military action.

However, this also supports redeployment of our troops. Not out of Iraq entirely, but to border regions to prevent foreign arms, money, and people from getting in to stir the pot with the ongoing civil war.

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by RMNIXON

I think this thread is getting a little off track here. Your talking politics but not the nature of Intelligence. I understand being skeptical. You have a bad track record in Iraq to back you up. But this is not the same type of evidence as Iraq WMD. That evidence was based on what we knew they had as of the Gulf War, and whatever types of Human Intelligence and satelites looking at trucks and installations from the air. That and the games being played with UN inspectors. In short it was almost all circumstantial evidence and which can add up wrong. But in this case we have physical evidence you can work with. The only question is how good a case you can make that it came from Iran? But that is much more solid that just human sources saying Iran is doing this. I doubt the administration would risk sticking its neck out if it did not have a very good case. The political risk would be too great.

Good point Dick.


I'm still not sure if an invasion would be the correct course of action even if we proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iran was supplying weapons to further their own interests.

I don't think we have the right jockey holding the reins for a move like that.

[RMNIXON]

Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent

Good point Dick.


I'm still not sure if an invasion would be the correct course of action even if we proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iran was supplying weapons to further their own interests.

I don't think we have the right jockey holding the reins for a move like that.

I think this invasion talk is nonsense. It the same thing I heard when we were pointing fingers at Syria. I think this is more like a very strong message to Iran. We know what they are doing and how and we will work in Iraq to stop it! Hopefully they will back off?

[Pro Street]

Originally Posted by motivez

Because Iraq was contained. I mean, just a year or so before we invaded Iraq for being a "grave threat" and yadda yadda, Colin Powell and the rest of the Administration was talking about just how contained Saddam was.

Diplomacy isn't easy, and it's not fast, but it saves lives. We've seen what diplomatic pressure can do by looking at the internal debate going in Iran related to Ahmadinejad's support.

If we drop a bomb on Iran, the country will rally around the idea of defending against an external threat. He will solidify the support of the entire nation like we saw happen to Bush's approval rating after 9/11, and then instead of being on the margins of Iranian society, his ideas will become mainstream and have tremendous backing.

It would be a mistake. A huge one.

However, if we continue diplomatic pressure there's a good chance of succeeding without unneeded bloodshed. We have not even begun to exhaust the diplomatic options we have available to us.

A rush to war is completely the wrong choice here for very obvious reasons. One only need look at the history of our involvement with Iran and the outcome of those situations to see what the result will be.

If Bush dropped a bomb on Iran tomorrow, I find it unlikely that the country will rally behind him. The only way that would happen is if Iran openly attacked US forces in Iraq.

[motivez]

I'm taking about rallying around Ahmadinejad, not Bush..

[Kytro]

Originally Posted by ballz2wallz

15 yrs of trying to get him to cooperate with the rest of the world, just like you're suggesting we do with Iran. It didn't work with Iraq, what makes you think Iran will work with anybody else?

Military intervention has proved just as futile, and is killing people at a higher rate, reducing quality of life and risking US soldiers - all for a promised "golden era"

[nbiggershaft]

Originally Posted by ballz2wallz

15 yrs of trying to get him to cooperate with the rest of the world, just like you're suggesting we do with Iran. It didn't work with Iraq, what makes you think Iran will work with anybody else?

Technically he did disarm everything we asked him to disarm. We just accused him of not doing to the end.

[ballz2wallz]

Here's a nice little write-up:

Incoming:

[s]peaking on ABC’s “This Week” television programme, Senator John Kerry said he has no doubt that “there are weapons flowing across the border” from Iran.
“Nobody questions, those of us who have been to Iraq and in the region know that there are Iranian instigators, agents in Iraq, and that’s happening, there’s no question,” Kerry said.

Like Sparse Matrix says, the official left-wing line on the Iranian IEDs is that they’re phantom weapons concocted by Chimpy as a pretext for carpet-bombing Tehran. Waffles hasn’t gotten the memo yet, so he’ll have to climb down in a few days. Keep an eye out for it. It’ll be good for a laugh when he does.
Anyway, I don’t really care about Kerry. I just wanted a clickworthy peg to get you to read a pair of excellent posts at DefenseTech, one of them about those IEDs and another about the spike in attacks on U.S. helicopters. Noah Schachtman says we shouldn’t presume conclusively that the IEDs are coming from Iran: they might well have been pioneered there (Hezbollah uses the same weapon against Israeli tanks), but terrorist technology has a habit of migrating. Nevertheless, Iran’s the prime suspect and according to the intel official who briefed reporters yesterday, it’s not just those tankbusters they’re supplying. Rockets, TNT, and shoulder-fired missiles have also come across the border.
Regarding the helicopter attacks, DT’s in sync with Maj. Gen. Jim Simmons — the jihadis aren’t aiming for the choppers so much as they’re aiming for morale.

The situation in Iraq has its parallels with the [Soviet war in Afghanistan]. The main importance of new missiles would not be in shooting down helicopters, but on the morale of both sides. The Mujahideen took new heart that the previously invincible ‘Devils Chariot’ could be defeated. Soviet helicopter crews found themselves facing an opponent who could shoot back, and were forced to adopt more evasive tactics which limited their effectiveness.
A similar decrease in effectiveness could happen in Baghdad.

Per the Times, “General Simmons said he also believed that the insurgents might be especially motivated to shoot down helicopters as a way of discrediting the new American and Iraqi security plan.”
Exit question for our weapons experts via an e-mail from Michael Yon: What on earth is this?
More (Bryan): I know that for our friends on the left there’s a mental block associated with all claims coming from the administration regarding Iranian meddling in Iraq, but Michelle and I heard on the ground in Baghdad, from a Lt Col in intelligence, that Iran has ramped up its support for the militias and insurgents in the past year to 18 months. It’s hard to say just how much of a contribution to the total violence the Iranians are making, but it’s likely significant, both in arms and training. When you have an “uninterrupted flow of weapons” coming in from Iran to Iraq and getting into the hands of the anti-US/anti-Iraq forces, you have a major problem.
The facts about Iran’s meddling in Iraq aren’t coming from the top down in some drive to expand the war; they’re coming from within Iraq and are filtering up toward an administration that has so far been very reluctant to make much noise about it. From what we learned, the troops in Iraq that are aware of the situation find the administration’s slowness to respond both perplexing and frustrating. Their fellow soldiers are dying at the hands of the mullahs, and so far the mullahs are getting away with it.

[ballz2wallz]

Originally Posted by nbiggershaft

Technically he did disarm everything we asked him to disarm. We just accused him of not doing to the end.

And yet, they continued to refuse to cooperate with international inspection agencies. We had no other choice but to assume he was hiding something.

[motivez]

The issue really isn't whether or not arms and funding are coming in from Iran, but whether or not it's officially sanctioned and organized by the Iranian government rather than rogue elements of it.