The Day After We Strike Iran

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/8151

The Day After We Strike Iran
by Gary Leupp | Jun 16 2007


snip//

Meanwhile, reaction in Iraq to reports of a U.S. strike on Iran will hardly be positive. Iraqi Shiites (60% of the population) will naturally identify with victimized Shiite Iran and hate the occupiers more, without necessarily fearing them more. If you really want to do something that will fuel the Shiites' historical sense of victimization, and unite Shiites from Lebanon to Oman and beyond, the best thing you could do is bomb Iran--not sparing the holy sites. But Iraq's Sunnis won't be happy either. Whatever their feelings about Iran, they'll feel no joy in the expansion of U.S. operations in the Muslim world. The entire world will respond with revulsion. From Europe to Japan there will be much discussion about how to best distance oneself and protect oneself from a USA gone nuts.

But what will happen here in the U.S. after the Iran attack? How will we react? If it happens, it won't be announced the way the invasion of Iraq was. There will be more and more unattributed reports of Iranian arms deliveries to unlikely recipients like the Taliban or Sunni "insurgents" in Iraq. More alarmist reports on Iran's nuclear progress. More propaganda about Iran's intention to nuke Israel and produce a second Holocaust. More indignant statements about Iran's defiance of UNSC resolutions. But the timing might come as a surprise.

As the attack gets underway some Democratic leaders in Congress will indicate support for the move, based on the doctored intelligence reports they've read, or have had on their desk and possibly perused. Some will withhold comment or maybe even object to the action. I have the feeling both timidity and stupidity will initially prevail. There is little precedent for U.S. politicians condemning a U.S. attack on a country just after it's occurred.

I would expect those on the contact-lists of the various antiwar coalitions would be out on the streets in force immediately after the (first) attack, shouting "SHAME" and making it clear to the world that Bush doesn't represent the American people. I'd expect that large numbers of people would gather to demand that the Congress move immediately to impeach Bush and Cheney. I'd hope that the Democrats in Congress would find it in their interest to do so, but if Nancy Pelosi becomes president, will there be any great change? On Iran, Pelosi has deferred to AIPAC.

The antiwar movement has become disillusioned with the Democrats, and even with a mercilessly self-perpetuating system that uses its two parties to convey the illusion that the political status quo is the product of competition. Still, it sees no alternative to a mix of letter-writing, lobbying, voting, rallying, marching, exercising constitutional rights, operating within the paradigm. But Cindy Sheehan officially dropped out of the movement concluding that the "paradigm. . . is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble."

She is right. The neocons want us to "think outside the box." Maybe we should one-up them and think outside the system. The "way our system works," writes Andrew J. Bacevich, "negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent." In it, "Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics." What can the honest dissenter do when informed that the U.S. ("your") government has committed a spectacular war crime? When can you do when you learn that, once again-- without your permission--the U.S. has attacked a sovereign country posing no real threat to you? Generating enormous hatred for America throughout the world? What do we do the day after? I would just like to pose the question for discussion as we approach that moment.

:scared: :scared:

We don't need to wait for Iranic Events. God knows we've tried everything except national strikes and insurrection.

If there are strikes riots etc. The bushies are ready.
Microwave crowd control devices,"free speech zones",internment camps, The cabal of assholes have all sorts of nasty"non lethal" shit to capture a populace.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/12/72134
http://www.wanttoknow.info/050708nonlethalweapons
http://www.au.af.mil/au/aul/bibs/soft/nonlethal.htm

And get them working for free for greedy asshole corporations like unicor.
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/mt/mt11labor.html
Jail where nobody has any rights,
http://www.prisonwall.org/labor.htm

And if you get hurt by some crowd control weapon you can't easily sue.You know tort reform took care of that letting corporations and courts declare your problem"frivolous".Remember the medical costs for the uninsured hurt by crowd control weapons ,The Hospital will make sure you are harassed by collections and and in debt and if you can't pay up fast enough you can't easily go bankrupt now.What will the solution proposed by the greedy be? Indentured slavery, the age old scam works in 3rd world countries to keep families slaves for generations.


These pigs are ready to retaliate and quash any hopes of our country making changes as it wakes up, making changes through means different than writing letters that get ignored,phone calls that go unheard,and sign waving peaceful protests that get scuttled in the background ,negated as"focus groups"...

Not to mention aircraft carriers sinking, etc. The US will not attack a nation that will fight back and destroy the military.

If they did, they wouldn't have sent them on a mission to invade a country that didn't attack us and had no present capability to do so. They're delusional and don't see that there's a limit to what even the strongest military in the world can do. They choose to ignore the fact that our treasury is massively in debt to foreign investors and most of the world has lost its liking and respect for at least our government, if not our people.

Howard Dean was bitterly attacked for suggesting that the day might come when we wouldn't be the strongest nation on the planet any more. Unfortunately, we may see that day soon because of the actions of this administration, the one that defines itself as patriotic but doesn't know the meaning of the word.

By attacking Iran the United States will become an outlaw nation in the eyes of the world. On that day President Bush will order the Federal government to also become an outlaw government domestically; Bush will declare a state of emergency, implement martial law, ban protests and become a dictator.

The Neocons haven’t spent six years gathering vast amounts of power to the presidency to hand the office over to a democrat.

The attack on Iran will also serve as an economic scapegoat. The economic policies of the Neocons have destroyed the middle class and working poor. Deregulation of the economy has lead to some very questionable accounting practices in corporate America, the mortgage industry and the housing bubble are ready to implode; the resulting depression will now be blamed on the war with Iran instead of the republicans.

I’d advise Americans to look at a map of the Middle East; the only land based airport that could be used for an attack on Iran is Diego Garcia 4,000 miles from Tehran. The host countries of all the other American airbases in the Middle East have forbidden use of bases on their land for an attack on Iran. Tehran is 700 miles from where American aircraft carriers could launch planes in the Persian Gulf but then the carriers would be trapped in the Gulf by Iran’s arsenal of anti-ship missiles. Planes launched from carriers in the northern Arabian Sea would have to fly over a thousand miles of enemy territory to reach Tehran. Iran has Russian, state of the art, anti-aircraft missiles. An attack using carrier based planes only will be far from the shock and awe of Bush’s attack on Iraq. Also because of the long distances an attack with cruise missiles would give the Iranian leadership time to escape into Iran’s vast countryside.

Because of the geography it’s my guess that the first waves of attacks on Iran will be with ballistic missiles, it’s also my guess that these missiles will be armed with nuclear warheads. Overlooked in the Project for A New American Century’s defining document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” is PNAC’s desire to use chemical, biological, genetic and nuclear weapons.

Except for the usual principled Democrats, Dennis Kucinich to name only one of many, I expect the Democratic establishment to rally around Israel, I meant to say the US, and back the bombing of Iran. If Bush uses nuclear bunker buster bombs, I think that some of the Bush enablers in the Democratic Party might even find that repugnant, but they won't say anything.