"The Middle East: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead"

[seemslikeadream]

We will be in a war with Iran before the end of bushs' term


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3013538790563353035&q=William+R.+Polk&total=7&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0



Speech to the Foreign Policy Association entitled "The Middle East: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead" featuring William R. Polk, Senior Director of the W.P. Carey Foundation

http://www.fpa.org/topics_info2414/topics_info_show.htm?doc_id=404719

What would a ground war entail?

Obviously, I am not privy to the work of U.S. STRIKECOM, but I think its shape and direction is not hard to guess. Either during or immediately after a massive aerial bombardment, special forces teams would be inserted into Iran. Their task would be to go down into the nuclear installations to destroy what the aerial attack missed. However, it is almost certain that enough of these teams would get caught that larger ground forces would have to go in and try to rescue them. Much of Iran's 850,000 man army, like Saddam's smaller force, would have been wiped out or disorganized, but Iran has a 150,000 man national guard which would immediately take up guerrilla warfare. They showed their fanatical devotion to their country during the Iraq-Iran war and almost certainly would do so again. Iran is large and has several times the population of Iraq; so it could, and almost certainly would, fight a protracted guerrilla war. Preparing for it, Iran has been building a stockpile of suitable equipment from armor-piercing rifles to night-vision goggles. Although the governing religious establishment is not popular with many Iranians, they are firm nationalists. No more than the Iraqis in 2003 or the Cubans in the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 would Iranians be out in the streets with flowers in their hands welcoming foreign troops.

The war would be fought not only in Iran but also, as the Iranian government has warned us, in three other areas.

The first is a counterattack by Iran's Fajr-3 missiles which can carry multiple warheads and can reach at least Israel.

The second is the so-called “oil weapon.” If Iran takes its 5% of the world's flow of oil off the market (which might happen whether or not it decides to do so), the price of oil will skyrocket. The recent price rise from $50/a barrel to $80 reduced American income by about $102 billion. A rise to $120 would cost America an additional $680 billion. The effect on the American and world economies of a larger price rise would be catastrophic. At $150, which many oil experts think likely, the loss of US national income would be nearly $1 trillion and 200 million.

Is this unrealistic? I think not. Iran would almost surely not be an isolated campaign. Saudi Arabia's oil is produced by workers who are presumably sympathetic to Iran and might engage in sabotage or strikes. Tanker transit of the Gulf would be difficult and costly and the Iranians have in place missiles to interdict it. Other countries would surely use the crisis for their own benefit, putting further pressure on prices.

The third aspect of the war is almost certain to be an enormous increase in attacks on American and Israeli targets world wide. Shiis constitute large parts of the populations of the Gulf States, Pakistan and even Turkey. In Lebanon, the most powerful single political group, Hizbullah, is a Shia-based movement. And, of course, Iraq now has a Shia-led government, many of whose leaders spent much of their lives in Iran and whose militia is Iranian trained. Even the Kurdish leader, Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Muslim, has very close ties to Iran. An American attack on Iran would push the Iraqis Shiis into what has been heretofore a mainly Sunni resistance; it would do more to unite Sunnis and Shiis than any effort they could mount on their own behalf.

To think through the dangers and prospects of a possible campaign,American strategists have been playing war games on Iran for several years. One, known as Tirannt took place during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003. American and British officers also played a war game code named Hotspur 2004 at Fort Belvoir in July 2004. Both called for a combination of air and ground assault. They also, according to the specialist on military planning for the Washington Post, William Arkin, involved nuclear weapons. I presume that other war games have been enacted since.

Consider now the costs of even an initially successful attack: To do so, take the Iraqi figures and multiply by, perhaps four, given Iran's larger size, greater oil production, and probably greater determination and outreach. The Iraqi costs are:

 Money $7.1 billion a month, or $237 a day or $10 million an hour so Iran would cost perhaps 25 to 30 billion a month.

 The Real cost to the American society (as calculated by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes) of the Iraq war was estimated at an aggregate of $1-$2 trillion; so Iran could be expected to cost between $4 and 8 trillion.

 American casualties in Iraq now total nearly 2,600. So we could anticipate perhaps 10,000 in Iran.

 American wounded from the Iraq war number about 18,000 of whom roughly half are permanently incapacitated; so Iran can be predicted at perhaps nearly 80,000.

 50,000 veterans of the Iraq war are estimated to need long-term psychiatric help and at least 50.000 more have multiple or severe concussions resulting in memory lost, fuzzy thinking or severe headaches. This category of wounded was not even identified until this year. Could a campaign in Iran produce less?

 An unknown number of men and women who served in Iran will develop cancer as a result of the use of depleted uranium in artillery shells and aerial bombs. If the Bushehr reactor is up and running, as it should be this year, a strike on it could cause as much cancer to people elsewhere as the Chernoble accident did.

 In FY 2005, the US borrowed $540 billion in part to disguise the effect of the war on the American population. It would need to borrow much more for Iran.

Such a course of events would present us with what the neoconservative former head of the CIA, James Woolsley foresaw – and advocated – as a generation or more of “permanent war. As historians have pointed out, what destroyed other great empires was not military defeat but financial collapse. Investment banker Felix Rohatyn predicted that such a course of action as this would be financially “unbearable.” No one knows what “permanent war” (or as the Pentagon has dubbed it, “the Long War”) would cost but estimates run to at least $15 trillion. Not surprisingly the conservative journal The Economist editorialized that the Neoconservatives are not conservatives. They are radicals whose agenda would virtually destroy the world in which we live and the good life we have worked hard to build.

[Amonester]

1. "They are radicals whose agenda would virtually destroy the world

in which we live and the good life we have worked hard to build."

The first part is true, but "the good life" maybe is not so "good" for many (but I understand it can qualify as being good, compared to what it will be when the LIEbermans, Cheneys, Bu$hes & Co (Clintons?) will make THAT mistake (for oil).