WWIII or Bust: Implications of a US Attack on Iran

Nice summary of the present situation in all its facets. I would add only that any war with Iran will not be over soon, which means that the various associated disruptions in global energy and commerce can be expected to continue for years.

Witnessing the Bush administration’s drive for an attack on Iran is like being a passenger in a car with a raving drunk at the wheel. Reports of impending doom surfaced a year ago, but now it’s official: under orders from Vice President Cheney’s office, the Pentagon has developed “last resort” aerial-assault plans using long-distance B2 bombers and submarine-launched ballistic missiles with both conventional and nuclear weapons.

How ironic that the Pentagon proposes using nuclear weapons on the pretext of protecting the world from nuclear weapons. Ironic also that Iran has complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, allowing inspectors to “go anywhere and see anything,” yet those pushing for an attack, the USA and Israel, have not.

The nuclear threat from Iran is hardly urgent. As the Washington Post reported in August 2005, the latest consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies is that “Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years.” The Institute for Science and International Security estimated that while Iran could have a bomb by 2009 at the earliest, the US intelligence community assumed technical difficulties would cause “significantly delay.” The director of Middle East Studies at Brown University and a specialist in Middle Eastern energy economics both called the State Department’s claims of a proliferation threat from Iran’s Bushehr reactor “demonstrably false,” concluding that “the physical evidence for a nuclear weapons program in Iran simply does not exist.”

So there’s no urgency - just a bad case of déjà vu all over again. The Bush administration is recycling its hype over Hussein’s supposed WMD threat into rhetoric about Iran, but look where the charade got us last time: tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, a country teetering on civil war and increased global terrorism.

Common Dreams

and does something nuclear, I could see this being the last straw for the UN. It will move to another country, and other nations that are economically stronger than we are will increase their ties with the rest of the world. We could very easily be shut off from international commerce if the will is there-and as markets in China and India develop, I can see the will getting stronger.

Nuclear weapons preempt other considerations, once used.
Use em or lose em.
And billions of people will be killed.
And the UN won't matter much once that gets going.

K&R.............

is that the world powers need some kind of balance to keep each other in check. During these last decades, the world powers of Russia, China and the U.S. was more or less in balance. Even during the "cold war", nothing really spiraled out of control except briefly during the Bay of Pigs.

Once Russia folded in 1992, however, things changed. Now, suddenly the U.S. found itself on Center Stage. We were ostensibly the SOLE world hegemon. It was a role that we were unprepared for. At that time, our financial strength had dissipated, and we had become a soft consumer culture.

We really had no business trying to run the world. But the PNAC was hatched and crawled into the White House nonetheless. We simply are not able to take on the world and rule it. Our economy is a hollowed-out shell. Our manufacturing base is gone; it was outsourced to other countries. This was the one thing that brought our enormous wealth in the early 1900's.

So we're now a country that really only does 2 things: imports a bunch of crap from China, and has the biggest weapons arsenal in the world. That does not equate with strength, believe me.

It's desperation.