Iran trying to take over Southern Iraq?
 

I guess they are an opportunistic type country.

A very interesting read - shows the Iraqi army is now a force to be reckoned with. This op was Iraqi from beginning to end without US involvement, and they put 30K troops on the ground without problem to do the op. They even fielded aircraft of their own. This wouldn't have happened last year. Maybe it is getting close to a time when the US can pull out of Iraq.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/04102008...852.htm?page=0

-S

Good for them but they still let the bad guys walk after though.

SOunds to me like 1600 to 1700 of them weren't doing so hot!

-S

They are not trying to take it over...yet. They are doing the same thing we would be doing if someone we considered not so friendly had taken over Canada.

PD

Hardly. I'd guess you would have a whole army crossing the border to liberate the Canadians!

I wonder what this guy was smoking while he wrote the article :huh:

Elaborate please? Iran's involvement of troops can be found in multiple articles right now, so I believe him. Here is an example about speed boats in the gulf, and at the bottom, they mention Iran's involvent in Basra again - http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1

Seems to be an internationally known thing.

-S

Iran maintains contacts with all factions in Iraq including the Greenzoners. They are the ones who negotiated the cease fire in Basra. To which Maliki reps traveled to Qum for the talks.

This guy sounds like a White House spinner.

When it comes to patrol boats, Iran constantly patrols along it's coastline and right up to the middle of the Straits of Hormuz. You can't navigate through the area without seeing them on a daily basis.

We have seen an enourmous ammount of exageration about Iran by the present administration and a few camp followers. These are the same people who invented the WMD in Iraq -- their credibility is totally bankrupt.

I guess you also believe that the World Trade Center thing was a conspiracy. I'd probably add in there that you probably think the Holocaust was a lie, and I bet you think the US never landed on the moon either, huh? :D

That's about the jist of what I get from your post.

-S

Are you kidding? He sounds pretty reasonable to me.

PD

Think its more a case of what were you smoking when you wrote that post?

How do you get that jist from Brag's post? Seemed pretty thoughtful and reasoned to me.

Actually Subman, given your previous rants and posts, he seems more reasonable than you.

You go for too many assumptions. You were ready to pounce the minute you read the name "Iran". You seem to be the opportunistic one here. Brag brings up several good points. I especially like the one about the WMD's. Bush has made too many wild claims about these people. He told us Saddam had WMD's. No WMD's to be found. He told us Iran was making nuclear weapons. Nuclear program has been offline since 2003. He told us Iran was training insurgents. Really? Did the same sources on the last two things give you this story, too? All the more reason why we should follow you without question like the good little patriotic citizens we are...:roll: :rotfl:

He's just looking for war, and so was Cheney, though Cheney always wanted a Middle-Eastern conflict since Old Man Bush took power (though OMB has more sense than his son; Cheney moved in on Bush, Jr. and played him like a violin).

[quote=Stealth Hunter]He told us Saddam had WMD's. No WMD's to be found.[quote]

If you want to kill a million people with conventional weapons you need a huge armoury to hide them in. If you want to kill a million people with WMDs you may only need a few barrels, and there's a lot of desert to hide a few barrels in.

If Saddam had WMDs then we may never find them, and in 50 years when the barrels have deteriorated enough to start leaking, no-one in the West is likely to care about a few dead bedouin, even if we find out.

Without getting into the US administration's desires for war, or lack of them, there are some curiously overlooked facts.

1. Saddam did have a huge WMD programme pre-Gulf One. Chemical, nukes, biologicals - the works. He spent untold billions developing the abilty to spread mass death around his region.

2. He had repeated;y used them both in war and in crushing internal dissent. This was not a man reluctant to use a last-ditch weapon.

3. His cooperation with agencies such as the IAEA was, let us say, less than forthcoming. He lied, he hid, he insisted that his people had to be questioned with his secret police present, he seized discovered documents and returned them with chunks cut out. Inspectors were denied access to huge facilities across the country under the excuse that they were 'presidential palaces'.

4. Although it appears that the Iraqis did in fact destroy their WMD stock, they were far less than forthcoming WRT providing proof of this.

5. The Iraqis had definitely continued to work on long-range missiles, specifically banned under the Gulf One treaty and which, given their high CEP, were best suited for delivery of WMD.

All in all, a reasonable man might take Saddam's behaviour as that of a man trying very hard to hide something.

The irony of Saddam's fall is that he could have - at any time up to the day before the USA moved in - stopped the whole thing by simply saying, "OK, we have changed our minds. Sorry for the previous problems. Come on in now and look for yourselves. Your inspectors can go anywhere. We will provide the records you want. You can have unrestricted access to our scientists. We have nothing to hide and are willing to prove it. How can we help you?" Faced with that (and of course real subsequent cooperation), the legs would have been cut out from under even the most rabid Saddam-hater in Washington. Instead, he stonewalled, dodged, lied - and died.

Not much sympathy for Saddam from this end. He was a vampire and deserved everything he got. It's just a pity Washington didn't do much thinking about what had to happen post-Saddam before they launched. Another Marshall Plan and Iraq could have been an R&R choice for tired Yank troops. And it would have cost far less than the war.

I'm not sure on this one.
What we've found out about the coercive intelligence regime in Washington leading up to the war leads me to believe that it was going to happen one way or the other.
Also, the amount of people in the run-up to the war saying there ain't any weapons, tells me that the whole idea of WMD was a pretext, an excuse. You can't go to war without public support, so you run around keeping the same couple of phrases really close together, "saddam....9/11.....al-qaeda". Overt stating isn't required.

Saddam's strategy was a gamble. By keeping the world guessing about his WMD capabilities; by obstructing the inspectors, wheeling out the odd Al Hussain(?) missile infront of the cameras every now and then; he managed to keep his main opponant Iran in check. As Iraq's military was fatally weakened by the Gulf War, WMD capapbilities were all that was preventing Iranian domination. Saddam calculated that the US and her allies would not be stupid enough to remove him as this would hand Iran control of the gulf on a plate.

Unfortunately for Saddam, he had no idea who he was dealing with. G W Bush and the neocon agenda were not like the elder Bush he'd dealt with before.

If the inspectors had been able to visit and see everything they wanted I suspect that they would have discovered the cupboard was bare afterall.

Are you sure about that? Yes we sure as hell could have done a lot better than nothing after post Saddam but what we have today would have happened anyway. Our stupid inability to think ahead and the arrogant assumption that we would be seen as heroes by all Iraqi's just accelerated the problem. We just put a blindlfold on and jumped in with one foot. Jumping blind and one footed will always hurt when you land and fall.

That is however my point. Regardless of what spin was or was not happening inside Washington, had Saddam or his UN ambassador publicly announced (and followed through on) an open-door policy for the inpections, public support for the invasion would have been lower than whale poop. The best defence against darkness is light, after all. Even the hottest hawks could not have surmounted that one, I suspect.

mrbeast has a good point. Saddam, not for the first time, but just about for the last time, misjudged the consequences of his actions. Of course, any tyranny has to keep an iron grip on its own people or risk a coup or revolution; the open-door policy might have been seen as a sign of weakness.

Bottom line - good riddance to him.

When it comes to winning conventional wars, nobody can match the USA. That is a given. But afterwards? My admiration drops off rather steeply, sorry.

It was clear as the fighting ceased that there was in most circles in Iraq a lot of relief that the monster was gone. People can accept a lot of short-term hardship in return for freedom, but the masses forget pretty quickly. From what I have read (and I will admit that I was not there), public opinion started dropping when it became clear that their lives were not going to improve anytime soon. Had the coalition moved immediately (with a plan as detailed as the invasion op plan) to get power back on, rebuild bridges, restore communications, restock hospitals, provide school supplies, etc, the average Iraqi would have been able to draw a good conclusion about the foreign invaders. Had there been a simple, clearly-stated roadmap, with firm deadlines, for the foreign troops to leave, it would have done much to diffuse the feeling that the USA were only there to seize Iraq's oil. Had the requirement for substantial security forces in Iraq to deal with the inevitable chaos been agreed to by the politicians (the generals seem to have seen it), then either there would have been far more coalition troops to keep intial order or else segments of the existing Iraqi army might have been maintained. Had funding been provided to the various minority churches for refurbishing their temples and shines, it would have brought enormous good will.

This sort of thing is not rocket science. I and a friend discussed it as the war was just starting. Truman's Marshall Plan kept Europe from going communist after WW2; a repeat would have done much to prevent the problems we see now. There are of course never any guarantees, but it was the best card in their hand - and they did not play it.

But then governments rarely miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

"Trumans" Marshall plan? :lol:

IIRC it took George Marshall three entire years after the end of WW2 to finally get Truman to agree to that plan and then only after thousands had frozen to death in their own homes due to lack of fuel.

But I believe you're right. Once it got off the ground the Marshall plan did help a lot, however it also depended on the citizens of those countries recieving aid, especially Germany, to step up and do most of the recovery themselves. This didn't happen all that much in Iraq where in spite of similar aid programs the population as far as i can tell basically sat back and expected it all to be done for them while they engaged in settling old scores with their neighbors.

IMO what was needed in immediate post war Iraq was not a Marshall plan but rather
a period of martial law backed up by a huge military presence comparable to the Allied armies total and complete occupation of Germany in the first three years after the war ended.