Red Harvest
ABC's The Blotter says "NATO officials say they have caught Iran red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces."
Here's how I think the policy debate will go following this discovery.
NATO: We caught the Iranians red-handed!
Diplomats: How can you be sure it was really red? Couldn't it have been vermillion or crimson maybe?
NATO: They were caught red-handed I tell you!
Diplomats: Let's have a little nuance here.
I don't think any of this is news. Neither is this old saying: "there are none so blind as they who will not see."
posted by wretchardthecat at 6/06/2007 07:00:00 PM
9 Comments:
You're being charitable in assuming the Yurps are merely blind in their assumed superiority, and not countries full of weedy little cowards.
Plus which, they're all poor and don't have the money to buy the really good toys to play with the Big Boys, which also mitigates against going toe-to-toe with rich terrorists who *do* have money to throw around. Tehran is now supporting fighting in Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan and we thought *we* were stretched thin!
It's worse for Tehran than you think, nahncee. But they're so close to getting Nukes, I don't think we can afford to wait for them to collapse.
Reluctant jurors and diplomats sometimes get lucky:
If the blood-soaked and shrunken glove don’t fit, you must acquit.
If Ahmadinejad don’t openly and with corroborating evidence confess, you don’t hafta get rough or seek inconvenient redress.
And if the Mullahs build the nuke, they really are Kooks.
This is perhaps the biggest mystery of this war -- to me, anyway. Knowing we were going into perhaps the most treacherous neighborhood on the planet, I expected interference from Iraq's neighbors from the outset. Especially so, given our experience with the Ho Chi Minh trail in Indochina.
Is there some value to allowing this to continue for 4+ years which outweighs not only the direct damage, in terms of casualties and disruption of Iraq'a reconstruction, but also the near evaporation of political support and public morale?
In other words, is allowing Iran, Syria and Sauda Arabia (and who knows who else) to interfere with Iraq one of those 'hard choices' -- like knowing Coventry would be bombed but being unable to warn the city's residents, for fear of letting our enemy know what we knew?
Essentially, I think that the inability to find WMD's in Iraq -- after so much of the case for war with that country, in the public's mind, became associated with WMD's - has resulted in the political discrediting of ANY intelligence information. This is particularly the case when combined with the historical reluctance of the post 1970's Democratic Party to sanction any military measures whatever. The WMD issue has given a tremendous boost to their most dovish tendencies.
We have essentially lost the initiative. We will not be allowed to act on intelligence, no matter how reliable it may appear to be, if acting involves some type of proactive military step. We are left with waiting for the enemy to make a big enough mistake to override the public mistrust of intelligence.
Cosmo,
Price of oil. Iran & Saudi have lots, direct action against either likely to cause big spikes.
Close relationship. Saudi has a function of purchasing large quantities of inustrial and military merchandise from Anglo-American interests.
Thanks unaha, el jefe.
I know we're doing surgery near the beating heart of the global economy.
But we can't have planned to do what appears to be nothing (we may not know for years) about interference which surely must have been anticipated -- cut a deal (again) with the duplicitous Saudis, beat up on oil-free Syria to chasten Iran, whatever.
And we couldn't have gone in without some idea of what leverage we would exercise to keep interlopers in check.
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