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Last updated on August 10th, 2017 at 10:38 am
The Guardian’s Timothy Garton Ash foresees Tehran-led suicide attacks throughout the west in retaliation for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Better take out the whole country, then.
- People’s Newswire section of the People’s Cube reports:
“Iran joins Nuclear Club, membership of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Club to follow”
- As already pointed out – before attacking Americans on their home soil, the Iranians would do well to ask around about how that usually works out…Posted by Margos Maid on 2006 04 20 at 01:12 AM • permalink
- Margos Maid
I like that line. The only question is conventonal os tactical nuke?
So many choices and so few targets….Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2006 04 20 at 01:26 AM • permalink
- Frollicker
Killing people with nukes is immoral.
For this reason, I would go for the conventional bombs.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2006 04 20 at 01:34 AM • permalink
- Speaking of the Guardian, check out this howler:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1756276,00.html
“Underwood also kept a wish list on Amazon, which has now disappeared, but is reported to have contained The [Mark Steyn] Monologues; he read Manga comics; he sold some things on eBay, as well as buying items for an online game called Kingdom of Loathing (including “hell ramen”) . He read Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut.”
Where it says Mark Steyn, it should read vagina. The author has explained himself, rather oddly, to the finder of this cock-up – Scott Burgess
http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2006/04/we_are_all_pote.html
Posted by attilathepun on 2006 04 20 at 01:42 AM • permalink
- HomerHK comments at the Guardian:
“Good article but very scary. What worries me is that hardly anyone seems to concentrate on the morality of any intended war/invasion – rather the line is war would be stupid because of feared retaliation..”
Er … Homer …have you stopped to think about the morality of wiping Israel off the map, or destroying it “in one storm”? Do you think this is some sort of Persian Peacenik Poetry?
- You can alomst hear the echos from the past…
1938, Poland, Smirny Dreyfuze:
“That Hitler fellow seems dangerous, we better leave him alone so he doesn’t do anything nasty to us!”I had a marketing prof back in college (a lovely Swedish lady, I might add) who stated that 80% of the people in the world are stupid. I’m thinking she shot a little low. I don’t claim to be the brightest bulb on the tree, but how could anyone miss the signals this loonie is sending?
- Iran with nukes, just another problem that the USA will have to clean up. And with no help from eurabia, other than criticism for every step the USA makes.
There really are times that I wish my country would just say “fuck the rest of the world, let them live in the world they created” and then pull up the gates.
Posted by David Crawford on 2006 04 20 at 03:54 AM • permalink
- What has happened that Mr. Ash would make such a statement without glowing beet-red and staring at the ground in deep embarrassment that his secret is out? The sight of so many unashamed cowards these days challenges my basic benevolence and makes me want to spit in the eye of every one of the unworthies I encounter.
Sorry excuse of a man.
- This Iran thing really worries me. The neutering effect of the western appeasement surrender monkeys in the press undermines our ability to act. Public opinion is easily turned toward copping out, to use a hippy term familiar with our friends in the press. I think the swarthy supremacists know this and will play the divisions to our detriment.
What happens if Iran is given to much rope and the west acts to late.
I googled the plains of megiddo.
Turns out it’s in Israel.
- #13 – I really don’t blame you for feeling that way. If I was a Yank, I probably would too. Americans are forever having the boot laid into them for what they do or don’t do. I guess that’s the price you have to pay for being the great democracy that everyone loves to hate. The problem, though, with pulling up the gates and leaving the rest of the world to its own devices is that there will always be some jealous, spiteful, hate-filled arsehole that’ll want to tunnel under them, fly over them, or go through them, to get at you anyway.
- #19 Howzat
“Timothy” can speak for himself, but I think the issue here is how a nuclear-capable Iran should be run. Or rather, run as a glowing cinder.
Bit different to “how the world should be run”.
BTW what IS Mr Fisk doing under that sheet?
Posted by Stop Continental Drift! on 2006 04 20 at 05:42 AM • permalink
- Garton Ash is a generally attractive small-l liberal who recognises that economic freedom is usually the key to any other freedom and has written interestingly about what stuff-ups like Warsaw Pact states or South Africa can do to acknowledge justice while continuing to function with compromised bureaucracies.
Or so I used to think.
- O/T
“Australians all let us rejoice
For we are young and free…”Net debt free federal government
Posted by Stop Continental Drift! on 2006 04 20 at 06:51 AM • permalink
- For the last several days something has been bothering me and I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Then last night, just as I was laying down it hit me. The entire Shia sect of Islam has this wierd messianic thing going on with the 12th Imam who disappeared as a kid back in the 9th century and who, according to the Shia, will reappear to lead Moslems to victory over evil in the end of times.
Then suddenly it all came together: missing kid in 941+Tardis+Wronwright=12th Imam in Wronwright’s basement eating Cheetos and playing nintendo.
Somebody tell me I’m wrong.
- 91B30
Im not sure how they will go following a 250kg pimple factory that Wronwright and the boys have turned him into.
Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2006 04 20 at 08:13 AM • permalink
- “Er … Homer …have you stopped to think about the morality of wiping Israel off the map, or destroying it “in one storm”? Do you think this is some sort of Persian Peacenik Poetry?”
Sadly, he probably does.
Posted by Tatterdemalian on 2006 04 20 at 08:27 AM • permalink
- When Iranian “students” were holding Americans hostage in 1979, my Dad said it would be a great place to test the neutron bomb. I think the Persian Proving Grounds may be opened.Posted by Some0Seppo on 2006 04 20 at 09:10 AM • permalink
- Of course there will be Western-wide suicide attacks if we bomb Iran. Just like there were after the Afghan invasion, just like there were after the Iraq invasion.
Just like people like Ash warned us.
Posted by tim maguire on 2006 04 20 at 09:27 AM • permalink
- Garton Ash is one of those people who’s been a huge disappointment. A brave and insightful chronicler of the fall of Communism, personally involved with the likes of Havel and Michnik in Czechoslovakia, he’s become a typical timid lefty in the face of the Islamic totalitarian menace. That seems to be the price of working at the places where he works, though, like The Guardian and The New York Review of Books, where dissent cannot be tolerated….
I’d still recommend his book The File, though, about his experience reading his own Stasi file and reliving his youth—through secret police eyes.
- Oh, that’s bad.
(hautily and angrily scribbles down the name 91B30 in the Book of Righteous Retribution. Considers renaming the somewhat weighty book the Holy Book of Wronwrighteous Retribution. Decides it needs careful and deliberate consideration. Resolves to send another request to Karl for a Night of the Long Knives, Chapter II).
Posted by wronwright on 2006 04 20 at 09:56 AM • permalink
- the frollickingmole — But they might watch his documentary…Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 04 20 at 10:30 AM • permalink
- Persia needs to study these words and look at these pictures very carefully. I mean REALLY VERY CAREFULLY.
“I can’t imagine anything that would infuriate the Americans more. I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
Admiral Yamamoto, after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
- El Cid, that was another country. One that would never have let John Kerry serve as dogcatcher, let alone nearly become President.Posted by Rob Crawford on 2006 04 20 at 11:30 AM • permalink
- Couldnt some of the smarter people make a nuclear attack on Iran look like a monumental fuck up that they created themselves? i.e. they enrich the uranium and start to make a bomb(s) then all of a sudden things go wrong and they end up seemingly nuking themselves. Sort of like a chernobyl incident, but on a bigger scalePosted by artful-dodger on 2006 04 20 at 12:40 PM • permalink
“I can’t imagine anything that would infuriate the Americans more. I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
Admiral Yamamoto, after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Actually, Yamamoto never said that. It’s a line from Tora, Tora, Tora that the screenwriter came up with.
- We will never use nukes on Iran. We couldn’t stand the criticism.
I have no doubt that if the peacenik crowd had just shut the fuck up, the Iraqi insurgency would have faded away by now and the Iranians would be cowed. Fucking traitors. They gave aid and comfort to the enemy, and now the Iranians know we don’t have the stomach for another war.
- Wow, so Hillary bombs Iran and even that is Bush’s fault!
I love to see th left twist its logic like a pretzel to come up with their default position: Bush is Satan.
For the sake of argument, if at that time all Iran can come up with is 10,000 dead for our side, isn’t that better than numerous of their nukes pointing at us (and leveling Israel) in the future? If they did unleash their suicide brigade, the “loyal” anti-war opposition would be over, and so would the mullah’s reign.
- This is the scariest part of his whole scenario:
In a series of crisis meetings, President Clinton, her new secretary of state, Richard Holbrooke, and her new secretary of defence, Joe Biden…
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 04 20 at 02:42 PM • permalink
- #13—There really are times that I wish my country would just say “fuck the rest of the world, let them live in the world they created” and then pull up the gates.
Especially when you read something like this.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 04 20 at 03:41 PM • permalink
- #13, I sympathize. Even when we overseas back in the 70’s, we met some pretty hostile anti-Americanism. But the fact is, we can’t turn our backs on the rest of the world. It’s just not possible any longer. The world is too small and too interconnected. And we do have friends out there, even if they don’t get heard sometimes.
- If Iran decides to embark on revenge attacks on US soil, the challenge for the US is to kill all Iranians in a way that is least offensive to lefties.
This shouldn’t be too hard to work out. Lefties think:
1. nuclear is bad.
This should not be a problem, as if memory serves, more japanese were killed by conventional bombs than by nukes. The non-nuclear Massive Ordinance Air-burst Bomb can do the trick nicely.
Historically, lefties have not had a moral problem with people in Tokyo who were killed in fire raids, but Hiroshima/Nagasaki was a big no-no.
2. Depleted uranium ammunition is bad.
Easy, leave the uranium in the ammunition.
3. Think local, act global
US Defence should do whatever it can to use recyclable ordnance.
Also, by establishing colonies of threatened animal species such as the Iranian cheetah in areas once inhabited by people, the US can gain many brownie points from lefties who have more respect for animals than people (this is a large percentage)
By learning from history, and taking a few simple steps, the US can wipe-out the population of Iran, and minimise unnecessary suffering for those of us in West by heading off the emergence of a new generation of smelly hippies/Helen Caldicotts/whining opinion pieces in newspapers.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2006 04 20 at 07:03 PM • permalink
- For utter moonbattery, you can’t go past the leftie punk songwriters. The Age’s EG section p7 today includes this review of “For Blood & Empire” sung (?) by Anti-Flag. The loving reviewer Dave Cook writes (no link):
Some tracks sacrifice the medium for the message ( War Sucks, Let’s Party, The WTO Kills Farmers ) but generally the tunes will please no matter which way your politics lean. The highlight is the understated irony of the catchy One Trillion Dollars – apparently the amount of US dollars spent each year on the international arms trade – with the absurd but somewhow poignant opening line, ‘One trillion dollars could buy a lot of bling.’ Indeed.
How can such stuff be satirised?
- I wonder if one of the “options on the table” is program of periodic EMP airbursts over selected sites?
At 10 miles high you get 62 mile circumference coverage with 0 efficacy.
I know enough about modern plant and equipment processes to say with some authority that the constant replacement of control and telemetry devices would effectively halt any production line—cascading centrifuges and the like.
There’d be the added advantage of total loss of command and control, communications, “first-world” methods of manufacturing … well you get the picture.
Comments?
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 04 20 at 08:22 PM • permalink
- One trillion dollars , my goodness.
The left on the other hand spend their money far more usefully.
“The Labour Party has defended reports Cherie Blair left it with a £7,700 bill for a personal hair stylist at the last general election”
A Labour spokeswoman said: “So what?..we won the election.”According to the figures, Mrs Blair’s hairstyling cost £275 per day for the month leading up to the election.
- The WTO Kills Farmers , hmmm. Snappy title, but can you dance to it? A trillion dollars will buy you a lota bada bing bada boom too.
#51—Comments?
I have only the foggiest notion of what you’re talking about, but there is this (a discussion of EMP threats to military systems—I think it applies):
The “acid test” of the response of modern military systems to EMP is their performance in simulators, particularly where a large number of components are involved. So many cables, pins, connectors, and devices are to be found in real hardware that computation of the progress of the EMP signal cannot be predicted, even conceptually, after the field enters a real system. System failures or upsets will depend upon the most intricate details of current paths and interior electrical connections, and one cannot analyze these beforehand. Threat-level field illumination from simulators combined with pulsed-current injection are used to evaluate the survivability of a real system against an HEMP threat.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 04 20 at 09:58 PM • permalink
- #53 Thanks, Kyda. It was not so much military systems (many of which are “hardened” with shunts, faraday style isolation and so on) I was considering as targets but refining, manufacturing, computing and communications infrastructure.
EMP’s don’t kill (at least not directly) but they could seriously hamper production and communications.
Just thinking, is all.
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 04 20 at 10:08 PM • permalink
- So, that’s what a $490 hairdo looks like.
Bill Clinton’s people struck much the same attitude after they told us how much his post-presidential mid-town Manhattan office cum bachelor lair/seduction palace was going to cost us. That attitude is what landed him in Harlem.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 04 20 at 10:21 PM • permalink
- Yeah, I know. But it sounds as though you can’t predict results. Though if it’s just general disruption you’re after…
Okay, shutting up now about something about which I know nothing.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 04 20 at 10:27 PM • permalink
- An interesting article on diplomacy with Iran
- Why does the ABC get away with repeatedly using the term Pro Democracy forces (most are Maoist forces)about the situation in Nepal where they are attempting to get rid of the king.
Why does it not logically follow that they say the same words about Pro Democracy forces in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Can they legitimately say the one and NOT the other.Is Nepal a democracy already?
Iraq certainly was NOT a democracy..
- 23 91B30
missing kid in 941+Tardis+Wronwright=12th Imam in Wronwright’s basement eating Cheetos and playing nintendo.
He’s kicking my ass at it, too! Serves me right, I suppose, for taking the little bastard under my wing, er hoof, and showing him the ropes. And the key-grinding machinery, and the printing press, and the chronometrical toolbox.
Worse yet, WronWrong has moved his extra refrigerator upstairs, so to get access to his surplus Butweipers we have to get past his evil mother-in-law. Not worth it. All in all, a week ill-spent.Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2006 04 21 at 09:26 AM • permalink
- Top of the page
Tehran-led suicide attacks throughout the west in retaliation for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Know what? We’re pretty much expecting those ANYWAY. If not Tehran-led then Al-Qaeda led; if not here then there; if not for this rationale then for that rationale. As a bargaining chip, this is worth less than a buffalo chip. All they’re going to do is piss us off, and MAYBE even wake up some of our leftist enabler/collaborators of ours. Well, that last point is perhaps a bit too much to hope for …
Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2006 04 21 at 09:46 AM • permalink
- 54 Mentalfloss
It was not so much military systems (many of which are “hardened” with shunts, faraday style isolation and so on) I was considering as targets but refining, manufacturing, computing and communications infrastructure.
They ain’t got no refining. Stupid bastards.
They ain’t got much manufacturing, but the only manufacturing that matters is their nuclear program. The computing and communications are what keeps the ordinary, non-Imam populace connected to the rest of the world, so them losing that would be a bad thing. But not enough of a bad thing, imho, to offset the very good thing of whacking their nuclear technology.
Thing is, it’ll be correctly seen as an act of war, so the time to do it is right after their next outragous provocation (same day delivery is ideal), and right before the conventional military follow-up. Because this EMP thang can (and most likely would) initiate a shooting war, but by itself won’t win it.
Not that I’m against the idea on those grounds, not by any means.Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2006 04 21 at 10:02 AM • permalink
- #62
What? Stoop Davy Dave,
—> Get
—> out—> of
—> my
—> basement!!!
And take the Hidden Iman with you!
Posted by wronwright on 2006 04 21 at 01:19 PM • permalink
An interesting article on diplomacy with Iran
Interesting that after we ran through Iraq like crap through a goose, the Iranians got all “oh, let’s negoooootiate”. Not that I’m not always willing to listen, but only the most naive would believe that “negotiations” with the mad moo-death to America, death to Israel-lahs would bear any kind of digestible fruit.
Who is it out there that’s touting a “Nixon goes to China” moment for Bush/Iran? Someone who’s usually pretty sensible as I recall.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 04 21 at 01:38 PM • permalink
- Well, no, it’s me.
And yeah, it might not be possible.
And yeah, it might not work even if it is possible.
But what the heck?
It seems like it’s got a better shot of producing good results BEFORE the shooting starts than afterward, so I still think that’s a sensible sequence in which to proceed.Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2006 04 21 at 02:16 PM • permalink
- 65
I’ll have to meet you halfway, Ens Wrongway. The Hidden Imam has to remain hidden, or it’s Armageddon. So I’m leaving him here, but, heh heh armageddon outta here. He’s your baby now!
The weekend’s here and it’s time for some Chaldean Mead!Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2006 04 21 at 02:19 PM • permalink
- This is what you are proposing to bargain with:
Since you’ve already mentioned the 12th Imam, let’s talk about what part he plays in our little scenario. The 12th Imam is a messiah figure that is sovereign of the world. According to the Iranian president, the Imam chose him especially: [from the article]
Last year, it was after another kalvat [t�te-a-t�te with the Hidden Imam] that Ahmadinejad announced his intention to stand for president. Now, he boasts that the Imam gave him the presidency for a single task provoking a “clash of civilizations”in which the Muslim world, led by Iran, takes on the “infidel” West, led by the Uited States, and defeats it in a slow but prolonged contest that, in military jargon, sounds like a low intensity, asymmetrical war. (Emphasis mine.)
So Iran doesn’t just have Allah on its side, Allah is commanding the war.
According to the article, Ahmadinejad’s analysis of the situation is this:
In Ahmadinejad’s analysis, the rising Islamic “superpower” has decisive advantages over the infidel. Islam has four times as many young men of fighting age as the West, with its ageing populations. Hundred of millions of Muslim “ghanzis” (holy raiders) are keen to become martyrs while the infidel youths, loving life and fearing death, hate to fight. Islam also has four-fifths of the world’s oil reserves, and so controls the life blood of the infidel. More importantly, the US, the only infidel power still capable of fighting, is hated by most other nations.
According to this analysis…, President George W. Bush is a aberration, an exception to a rule under which all American presidents since Truman, when faced with serious setbacks abroad, have “run away”. Current strategy, therefore, is to wait Bush out. And that, by “divine coincidence”, corresponds to the time Iran needs to develop its nuclear arsenal, thus matching the only advantage that the infidel enjoys.
There are serious problems with this assessment, but that doesn’t enter into this discussion. The question is does he believe his own rhetoric? How confident is Iran of this assessment? In an AFP article last week, for which I have no link (sorry), I copied these quotes:
On the threat of American military power:
I would advise [America] to first get out of their quagmire in Iraq before getting into an even bigger one,” General Safavi said with a grin.
“We have American forces in the region under total surveillance. For the past two years, we have been ready for any scenario, whether sanctions or attack.”
….At a Friday prayer sermon in Teheran, senior cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Janati simply branded the US as a “decaying power” lacking the “stamina” to block Iran’s ambitions.
And boy have they pegged the UN!
And hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told AFP that a US push for tough United Nations sanctions was of “no importance.”
“She is free to say whatever she wants, the president replied when asked to respond to comments by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice highlighting part of the UN charter that provides for sanctions backed up by the threat of military actions.
“We give no importance to her comments,” he said with a broad smile.
….“Whether you like it or not, the Zionist regime is on the road to being eliminated,” said Ahmadinejad….”
The Iranians refer to their success in enriching uranium as “the atomic miracle” and sent vials of the first batch, after great fanfare and rital, to a religious shrine.
Thus, I submit that the only reason these religious fanatics would have to sit down and discuss trade-goods would be to play the silly, life-loving infidel, and cheaply buy time. There’s always the promise, too, that he’ll give us more of the technology, or money to buy the technology, that mystic incantations couldn’t produce in a million years. Even those states who would trade, such as India and China, have stepped back and asked the US for an assessment of the situation. They said that the people in trade that they talk to sound sane, but they aren’t so sure about the actual rulers.
True diplomacy requires two honest brokers of interest. I am not ready to bet my life that Iran is an honest broker. They’ve given me every reason to believe otherwise.
- It’s a two-step plan, Salty.
1/ Negotiations, from a standpoint of overwhelming nuclear and conventional military superiority,
followed, if necessary, by
2/ conventional invasion, and all that goes with it.It ain’t perfect, but it’s an interim plan, you know, while I wait around for your better, alternate plan.
Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2006 04 21 at 05:06 PM • permalink
- Why no, Stoop, your plan is fine. First diplomacy, then war. We’ve had the diplomacy since 1979. Didn’t work. Now on with the war.
That is a short, flip answer, given to a serious question. It doesn’t reflect the years of thinking about the situation we are in, beginning with the first attack on the World Trade Center, which was when I first began to really pay attention and study what has happened since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Nor does it include any principled justification for our right to defend ourselves and our civilization – and this is a situation that screams to have just such principles articulated. But, in essense, it is my answer.
And by-the-bye, when I speak of making plans, I speak only for myself. I’m not in the business of making plans for the country. No one in a position to implement them would care or listen to anything I have to say.
- Salty for SecDef!Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 04 22 at 01:08 AM • permalink
- #4 – As already pointed out – before attacking Americans on their home soil, the Iranians would do well to ask around about how that usually works out…
Actually, pretty well. They’ve been studying The Mouse That Roared.
Posted by walterplinge on 2006 04 22 at 04:04 AM • permalink
- Salty Dog of War
First diplomacy, then war. We’ve had the diplomacy since 1979. Didn’t work. Now on with the war.
You in a hurry?
Nor does it include any principled justification for our right to defend ourselves and our civilization – and this is a situation that screams to have just such principles articulated.
Not needed. Self-evident. They strike; we strike.
They do conventional aggression; we reply with conventional retaliation.
They do nuclear aggression; we reply in kind.
Until they do some conventional or nuclear aggression, we, the disciplined, civilized side, are obliged to wait them out.
Psychotic tuff-talk from their side merits no response; it’s demeaning to even reply to it.Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2006 04 22 at 12:15 PM • permalink
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