Comments Posted By piscivorous
Displaying 1 To 5 Of 5 Comments
A LETTER TO THE TIMES ON BOB HERBERT'S COLUMN PUSHING A THIRD AIRPORT FOR CHICAGOLAND
For an interesting comparison go back and look at some of the arguments for and against DFW when it was built out in the middle of nowhere.
Comment Posted By piscivorous On 16.03.2009 @ 01:25
TOUGH HILL TO CLIMB FOR MY BELOVEDS
As a near life long Bears fan I am disappointed in your lack of faith leaves me wondering about the validity of your other analytic abilities. Da Bear by 31 to 13.
Comment Posted By piscivorous On 9.09.2007 @ 13:40
POLITICO'S SIMON FEELS THE GHEY FOR BILL CLINTON
Try Iraq Coalition Casualties http://icasualties.org/oif/default.aspx . It stays current daily and is considered accurate by many.
Comment Posted By piscivorous On 5.09.2007 @ 18:26
I saw an article surfing toady that claimed there were 500,000 purple hearts commissioned by the US prior to the anticipated invasion of Japan. Had a hard time believing this so I searched around and came up with this link http://www.purplehearts.net/id6.html confirming the article.
Imagine that! A battle in which the military leadership was anticipating one half of one million casualties; and given their battle experience of the past few years these were likely solid estimates.
When Bush leaves office we will have been in Iraq for approximately 70 months. The total causality count will be around 40,400 if you extract the monthly average so far and multiply it by 70. That is 8/10s of 1 percent of the anticipated casualties we expected the U.S. forces to suffer in an invasion of Japan.
This radicalized version of Islam is every bit as pernicious and evil as was the Shinto religion that drove the fanatics of Imperial Japan and we should begin to treat this war with the seriousness and persistence we perused WWII. It was a democrat that set the terms as "Unconditional Surrender."
We held open the Strait of Hormuz in the 80's and it would not be much trickier to do the same today. Declare Iran a belligerent and enforce a blockade. Shut of exports of crude from Iran and refined products to Iran. Load the Gatling guns, breakout the anti-personal artillery rounds and send in a couple more Carrier Battle Groups.
I believe that, with these fanatics, it is an existential struggle so the shit is going to hit the fan sooner or latter; to me 9/11 was a pretty good indicator of that.
Lugar may be right that there is insufficient political Iraqi will to do the hard thing but he neglects to mention the lack of political will on our part as well when it comes to doing the hard things as well. We need to discredit these fanatics and the only way to do that is to establish a semblance of representative government in the Middle East, insure it’s success as best we can and let the rest of the ME deny the same to their people. Don’t think they will be able to for long especially Iran and Syria.
Bargain and Fanatic are incompatible and should seldom be used in the same article much less sentence.
Comment Posted By piscivorous On 26.06.2007 @ 22:54
I don't believe that we are likely to get sufficient International cooperation to enact a sanctions regime sufficiently strong enough to persuade Iran that it would be in its own self-interest to abandon their enrichment program. I also believe that attacking their nuclear facilities carries more downside risk than upside. I do believe the reports I read that there is broad support among the Iranian middle class for regime change and rapprochement with the west and the US. Even limiting an attack to conventional weapons will result in sufficient collateral damage that it will have the effect of strengthening the Iranian regime and turning the general population against us.
Iran has to vulnerabilities that we can exploit to bring their nuclear program to an end and perhaps the downfall of the mullahs. I have read various estimates for the percentage of GDP that Iran gets through export of crude from 60% to 80% and that they are required to import somewhere between 20% and 40% of their refined products from abroad. I think that an approach similar to but greatly expanded from our response to the Iranian attacks on oil tankers in 1987 can be used to achieve or strategic goal visa via Iran.
By using the military resources we currently have staged in that area; two Aircraft Battle Groups, 4 minesweepers, two Marine Amphibious Assault Groups and what we are currently sending that way we could take over Iran's offshore oil production platforms and offshore terminals. This could be accomplished with minimal collateral damage to civilian population and infrastructure.
This will provoke a considerable retaliatory response from Iran but that is probably manageable. They would obviously try to shut down the Gulf and the Straights of Hormus with both their naval and shore battery assets. I don't foresee a problem with handling the navel ones in short order, while the shore launched cruse missiles would present somewhat of a greater challenge but given sufficient time these to would be suppressed.
I believe that at some point the Iranians would decide to challenge the oil assets of the neighboring Gulf states and hopefully the Patriot Missile Batteries currently in theater and on they way would work somewhat better than they did during Gulf War I and would prevent significant damage to those facilities.
Once in control of both the oil platforms and terminals and with the Gulf and Straights relatively protected so that the flow of oil from the other Gulf States could resume we should resume exporting Iranian Oil from the platforms we control with all proceeds flowing to a Trust for the Iranian people along the lines of the Alaska Oil fund to be distributed at such time as the reprocessing was halted and support for terrorism could verifiably be proven. If this were done I believe that that we would mitigate the ill will of the Iranian populace generated by the initial military action.
Comment Posted By piscivorous On 31.01.2007 @ 11:10
