Cyde Weys Musings

Rumblings about a potential war in the Middle East with Iran keep pouring in. It makes you think there really is something to this. Is George W. Bush insane enough to launch a third war when we can’t even win the two we’re currently engaged in? Are the Israelis really stupid enough to preemptively attack Iran, which would surely cause them to lose even more favor around the world? Does anyone besides the OPEC countries want the much higher gas prices that would be associated with a regional war in the Middle East?

The difference between attacking Iran and, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, is that Iran can actually fight back. Hence why I put “this could be fun” in the post title — if you’re a hardcore military nerd, anyway. Iraq and Afghanistan couldn’t do anything but sit back and get bombed from the air during the initial stages of our assaults, then our ground forces mopped up the remnants. A war with Iran would be much different.

Iran actually has medium-range missiles capable of striking our forces assembled in the Gulf. Our preemptive strike would have to be perfect, taking out all of their strike capability outside their borders within a few minutes at most, or else we would definitely be experiencing materiel casualties on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. Planning such an attack is incredibly hard, and it makes you wonder if anyone is seriously attempting it, or if this is all so much saber rattling.

So keep your eyes peeled. If we actually go down this idiotic path of a war with Iran, at least it’s going to be interesting. And Israel had better be very careful about it, or they’re going to have significant civilian casualties from Iran’s forces.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 16:49 and is filed under Politics. Keywords: Tags: Afghanistan, George W. Bush, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, preemptive attack, saber rattling, war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.