War with Iran inevitable?
I don't think it will matter if it's Bush or Kerry in the White House.
If Iran does demonstrate nuclear capacity... I can't see how the US will *not* attack Iran.
1) It can't trust the Iranian government, especially at this period of time, to handle such a responsibility...
2) It would seem necessary to pre-empt an Israeli attack on Iran, for the geopolitical reason of if Israel attacks Iran, there would indeed be holy "heck" in the MiddleEast...
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So the question is... will Iran either back down, or will it push the its nuclear card, inviting a 3rd war in the MiddleEast (the US attacking Iran).
I suppose the difference is that this time around, Europe will support US attacking Iran, should Iran detonate a nuclear device to prove capability, as Iran has lied to the IAE which has already made Europe unhappy.
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http://www.stratfor.com/free-scripts...EN20040708-841
STRATFOR Analysis
Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, July 8, 2004
July 08, 2004
Wednesday was a busy day in Iran.
Iranian Defense Minister Rear Admiral Ali Shamkhani explicitly warned the United States and Israel against launching an attack on Iran. The Defense Ministry confirmed Kurdish claims that Kurdish and Iranian forces had clashed near the Turkish border. And Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi accused Washington of creating trouble between Iraq and its neighbors.
All told, this spasm of activity adds up to some rather impressive diplomatic noise. For once, this is exactly what was intended: Iran wants to get the world's attention so it can then focus that attention on achieving its goals.
The problem is, time is running out. Since the end of Desert Storm in 1991, Tehran had been scheming to get the Hussein government in Baghdad overthrown in an attempt to amend Iraq's security profile from threat to neutral -- or better yet, vassal. To that end, Tehran fed the United States a steady stream of false intelligence, via Ahmed Chalabi, as to the nature of the Iraqi WMD program and the willingness of the Iraqi Shia to work with the United States in a post-Hussein environment. Meanwhile, Tehran worked behind the scenes to organize the Iraqi Shia into Iran-friendly groups.
When the Sunni Baathist guerrillas launched the Ramadan offensive in November 2003, the Iranians approached the Americans with a deal: Iran would keep the Shia in line if the United States ensured that the Shia would dominate Iraq. The United States, loath to fight both the Sunni and the Shia, signed on the dotted line.
And promptly abandoned the deal a couple months later.
Iran, which had thought it had a quiescent Iraq in the bag, then encouraged Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr to lob the United States a rebellion, as a means of pressuring Washington back to the table. Washington did not take the bait.
Instead, U.S. officials began negotiating security deals with the Sunni and the Kurds, and abandoned plans for an interim government that would have left the Shia firmly in charge. The government that took control on June 28 was the nightmare lineup for Iran: It has a Baathist prime minister, a Sunni president, a Kurdish foreign minister, and a Turkoman intelligence chief -- leaving the Iranians and their Shia allies with only the finance ministry and a vice presidency.
It is this interim government that will shape the development of Iraq's constitution and permanent government, the first major stage of which will be elections in January. In short, time is running out in Iraq, and the United States does not seem the least bit interested in cutting a deal.
Ergo, the noise.
The leading tool that Iran has used to capture international attention, and regain a seat at the Iraqi negotiating table, is its nuclear program. It is a stupendously poor choice of tools.
Now, Iran has little intention of fielding a weaponized nuclear device. Put more accurately, Tehran is all too aware that such a deployment would bring down the wrath of Israel (or at least Washington). Israel cannot tolerate an arch-foe such as Tehran having a weapon that could erase its existence with a single strike. For political reasons, Washington cannot tolerate an Israeli nuclear strike against Iran, and thus would need to launch its own conventional strikes against a half-dozen Iranian nuclear sites if the situation warranted.
The nuclear tool is also attracting attention from further abroad that Tehran finds most unwelcome. Kharrazi informed the Iranian parliament that Tehran would restart talks with the European troika of France, Germany and the United Kingdom later in July. The problem here is that the troika has already broken up: It was an attempt by Berlin and Paris to jumpstart the European Union's foreign policy, and it failed most impressively because the Iranians insisted on lying to the International Atomic Energy Agency about the details of their nuclear program. Any new "negotiations" will be perfunctory at best.
Iranian leaders believe that all this is manageable. They know they will not cross any red lines, such as detonating an actual nuclear device, and thus trigger a reflexive attack. The problem is that the Bush administration, after WMD-related intelligence failures in Iraq, does not trust its own intelligence capabilities. That leaves Washington either guessing -- and being forced to assume the worst -- or dependent upon its Israeli allies, who have every reason to encourage the United States to assume the worst.
All of which leaves the United States with an exceedingly poor understanding of Iran's actual capabilities -- and a very twitchy trigger finger.
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Originally Posted by Seran-the Current Retard Champion
