I don't want to argue about the reasons for the two A-bombs right now. Let's just remember the lessons of history and never repeat them again. And let's hope that a nuke-free world will happen, eventually.
Israel has enough to blow Iran to smithereens. In any case Iran won't do it because Supreme Leader Ali Khameini has ruled out nukes as against Islamic law. Defying totalitarianism is risky, and that goes double for religious totalitarianism which needs no concessions to basic reality.
And no, and I would prefer a world that never developed nukes to start with, too. We are fortunate that Hitler was too much of an ideologue to respect his physicists the way he could have.
And why would Israel blow up Iran, if Israel is blown up by some terrorist organization with no known leader, sponsor and borders? Tracing their roots back to the actual source may prove to be a slippery task, and I'm not sure Israel would want to attack the wrong country, would they? What if they're sponsored by Saudi Arabia? Or Turkey? Here's a scenario: Turkey sponsors a group which sneaks into Israel and activates a nuclear bomb in a Tel Aviv basement, prompting Israel to blame Iran, while Turkey is rubbing their hands with delight. Too implausible?
Modern warfare has stopped being a great power vs another great power for, like, 60 years. I understand how bound you are to the history books covering events and phenomena that existed more than half a century ago, but here's a news flash: we're living in the 21st century, not the 19th.
And lastly, I was wondering where you'd evoke Hitler's name. It happened in your comment #5. That's a new world record! :-)
Because Hezbollah, the group that provoked Israel into exposing how meaningless hard power is in today's world, is an Iranian proxy. Again, this is a *religious* extremism and Iran would be no less willing than the old Soviet Union was to destroy heresy in its proxies without. Secular extremism has to some degree to be rooted in the here and the now. Religious extremism can just handwave it all.
Didn't I just say that two comments above, how the last Great Power conflict was in 1950? But I suppose you didn't really read that comment before making this one.
If terrorists amounted to anything they'd have armies instead of resorting to terrorism. It is a weapon of the weak and the desperate.
Yet it works, and it works damn well today. The whole military of the most powerful countries in the world and the most powerful military alliance in the world have not been able to deal with a group of insurgents hiding in caves. Or would you say this is deliberate and they just don't want to deal with them at this point? That'd be an interesting conspiracy theory. ;-)
Hezbollah is sponsored by a number of organizations and countries, you cannot apply a label on them as an Iranian proxy, unless you'd like to show an even standard of measurement, in which case you'd have to include half a dozen Middle Eastern countries in your list of targets.
It's not so much that terrorism works as the reality that United States military force has never been able to defeat guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare led to a Seminole victory in the Second Seminole War, to a Sioux victory in Red Cloud's War, it led to the longest war in US history being fought in the Pacific......
US strategy is effectively battering an enemy to death upon superior force. Other armies can easily negate that strategy (Overland Campaign, the Second Indochina War) and the simplest and most effective means to fight a superior enemy is to use attrition strategies. The Taliban have learned from 2001 and are fighting a different war. We Yanks as always fight our wars the same way and never learn.
And frankly I'd be not surprised if the Iranians ultimately intend to turn Hezbollah on the Arabs. Arab-Persian hatred has some rather deep roots in Islamic history and with modern technology I have a feeling the First Gulf War won't be the last such confrontation.
Such has it ever been, so shall it ever be. It's really the ultimate lesson of American and human history in a nutshell: US Imperialism is always flawed and contains the seeds of its own destruction in much more insidious means than those elsewhere.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 06:20 pm (UTC)And no, and I would prefer a world that never developed nukes to start with, too. We are fortunate that Hitler was too much of an ideologue to respect his physicists the way he could have.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 06:35 pm (UTC)Modern warfare has stopped being a great power vs another great power for, like, 60 years. I understand how bound you are to the history books covering events and phenomena that existed more than half a century ago, but here's a news flash: we're living in the 21st century, not the 19th.
And lastly, I was wondering where you'd evoke Hitler's name. It happened in your comment #5. That's a new world record! :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 06:59 pm (UTC)Didn't I just say that two comments above, how the last Great Power conflict was in 1950? But I suppose you didn't really read that comment before making this one.
If terrorists amounted to anything they'd have armies instead of resorting to terrorism. It is a weapon of the weak and the desperate.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 07:56 pm (UTC)Hezbollah is sponsored by a number of organizations and countries, you cannot apply a label on them as an Iranian proxy, unless you'd like to show an even standard of measurement, in which case you'd have to include half a dozen Middle Eastern countries in your list of targets.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 08:06 pm (UTC)US strategy is effectively battering an enemy to death upon superior force. Other armies can easily negate that strategy (Overland Campaign, the Second Indochina War) and the simplest and most effective means to fight a superior enemy is to use attrition strategies. The Taliban have learned from 2001 and are fighting a different war. We Yanks as always fight our wars the same way and never learn.
And frankly I'd be not surprised if the Iranians ultimately intend to turn Hezbollah on the Arabs. Arab-Persian hatred has some rather deep roots in Islamic history and with modern technology I have a feeling the First Gulf War won't be the last such confrontation.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 08:18 pm (UTC)Well, if that's at least one historical lesson we could learn from, so be it.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 08:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 08:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 08:51 pm (UTC)