It's the Republican's initial announcement of their main fall election line.

It may be that they're not actually planning on attacking Iran.

It may be that they're trying to provoke Dems into fighting back, so they can go on FoxNews and paint them as weak on security, before the midterm elections.

A slightly new twist on the classic Rove-a-dope.

Could it be that there are partisan considerations driven by the November election?

OBF,

That is my sense too.

I cannot envision a scenario where actually attacking Iran helps the GOP, unless they make a couple limited strikes the day before the election.

Much more likely that this is all posturing.

I hope.

Laura:

Could we ask you guys to do as Kevin does and capitalize the topics of your new posts and not merely bold/italicize them (I can't tell the difference on this interface)?

It makes it a lot easier to scroll through the posts to find the end and beginning points.

Thanks.

Okay ... now off to read this post.

Bob

David W. >"It's the Republican's initial announcement of their main fall election line."

Correcto !

The Storm for War with Iran has to be in full force by November 1st so all the boogy man shadows can be manipulated to scare a sufficent number of voters thereby making all/any eballot box manipulations feasible & plausibly denyable

Same game round 2

"Eventually, the truth will emerge. And when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit, will fall." - Robert C. Byrd

Yeah, it seems like they are trying to keep fear levels high by releasing scary news every few weeks. I think they figured that with the recent Iran deadline it would be the best time to throw something scary out there. If it sticks then they might try pushing harder. If it doesn't they throw more scary stuff out in a few weeks.

Again, a right wing lie gets embedded into our subconscious.

There never was a "slam dunk" that Bush relied on. From the first, Bush & Cheney were wilfully ignoring good intelligence and cherrypicking bad intelligence. Tenet said, "It's a slam dunk", but that was in December 2002, months after Bush & Co. had already been banging the war drums and had already decided to go to war.

I couldn't find a link to Sick's piece in Laura's post. Anybody have one?

OBF & Disputo:

Agreed.

Bob

Apparently you can market a new product in August, after all..

Yeah, it seems like they are trying to keep fear levels high by releasing scary news every few weeks. I think they figured that with the recent Iran deadline it would be the best time to throw something scary out there. If it sticks then they might try pushing harder. If it doesn't they throw more scary stuff out in a few weeks. Posted by: Bill Hicks

While they were able to fool most of the people most of the time for about three years, I think most Americans now see the Bush administration as the boy who cried wolf. And at this point, it's not difficult for the Dems to simply say, prove it. And when they can't the subject just goes away.

Look at the "major" arrests made abroad of the group planning their attack in public chat rooms, and the paintball enthusiast in Florida. The Brits turned loose two more people, and while they have charged eleven, they are seeking yet another week's extension of holding nine others without charges.

In the next month, I predict that the coming recession becomes the major pre-election topic supplanting "terror."

mistakes won't stop them...

the voters will have to do that....

GOP '06: BOO!

This nasty propaganda has to be shouted down. Hear any Dems doing any shouting?

Is this the same Gary Sick that's the October Surprise conspiracy theorist?

Lots of credibility there.

You gotta love that the ranking Dem on the Politburo rubber-stamp committee is named Rush.
No judgement implied, of course.

What's the need for invading Iran? We're already in Iraq, the southern portion of which will be a de facto part of Iran in less than a year anyway.

I can see that as as new "strategy" along the lines of the laughable "fly-paper theory" of Iraqi terror attacks:

"No need to go to Iran! Bring Iran to Iraq!"

Of course, two can play at that "fly-paper" game, and it honestly makes more sense for the Iranians to say:

"No need to have long-range ICBMs pointed at America! Keep America in Iraq!"

Thomas:

Don't be any more of a douchenozzle than you already *have* to, okay?

Kenji:

Hey, don't bust on Rush Holt. He'd be my Congresscritter if I didn't still vote in my old polling place in the city (where I have Frank Pallone). He's been extremely receptive to the flaws in e-voting, he's a scientist and his record is very solidly progressive.

Busting on Rush Holt is like busting on Russ Feingold.

Bob

Just finished reading the report. What a waste of time. It contains nothing new and nothing of merit. No new data. No new analysis. No new insignt. No new recommendations--unless you count facile variations.

The intelligence criticisms and (*cough*) recommendations appear to be no more than excuses to (re)issue the Republican Readers Digest version of "Why You Should be Afraid of Iran", with a new publisher, and just in time for the election season.

The more relevant political question is why anyone would care about a report prepared by the Staff of a House Intelligence Subcommittee. A quick glance of the report shows that it does not recommend nor argues for regime change or for a military strike on Iran. It contains the standard bureaucratic boilerplate about the need for the US to increase the amount of and quality of intelligence about Iran, its intentions and its weapons development. The story about Pluto being downsized in the Solar System is a bigger one than the importance of this report.

One of my favorite errors in the report is that the map showing the potential ranges of Iranian missiles is centered on ... wait for it ... Kuwait.

Campesino, rather lamely, wrote: "Lots of credibility there."

If you have a problem with any of the mistakes that Sick points out in the report, by all means, bring them up. Otherwise, such a lame ad hominem attack means that you are tacitly conceding that he's correct.

Chicounsel wrote: "The more relevant political question is why anyone would care about a report prepared by the Staff of a House Intelligence Subcommittee."

Because we are seeing precisely the same thing in this report that we saw in the run-up to the war with Iraq. Because we are seeing the same distortions, the same reckless disregard for facts, the same hype, the same fear-mongering. Because the Bush administration and the Republican Party have ratcheted up the rhetoric in the past few weeks and we expect them to continue as we head into the fall elections. Because if we don't call them on their bullshit, early and often, the bullshit becomes the conventional wisdom and we will have allowed them to push us one step closer to falling off yet another cliff.

Tee-hee! Oh look, there's that dirty old geezer Thomas who's been trying to hit on me for the past two hours.

Watch! I'm gonna wiggle my buns right up close 'n' personal at him, and then FART IN HIS FACE :):):)

"Don't be any more of a douchenozzle than you already *have* to, okay?"

I doubt that's really Thomas1. And even if it is, it's such a bleedingly obvious troll remark, that it, along with its companion, deserves to die alone and unremarked.

PaulB:

Word.

Bob

PaulB:

Actually, it's quite a characteristic Thomas remark. And just as you feel it's your duty to call out the substantially old-news House report on Iran, so certain bloggers feel a desire to call Thomas out on his egregious sexism.

YMMV, of course.

Bob

I have to disagree, Bob. Those remarks are not really examples of egregious sexism, although Thomas may indeed be guilty of such, they're examples of egregious trolling -- the difference between the two having to do primarily with intent. I maintain that the person who wrote those comments knew precisely what he or she was doing, and knew precisely what sort of reaction would result -- said reaction being the sole reason for the remarks in the first place.

'Nuff said on my part.

PaulB:

The comment was of a piece with Thomas' usual agenda -- in this case wanting a thread on the new development in non-embryonic stem cell research.

The implication is that the guests here won't put up a post about it because they're "girl bloggers."

Calling it trolling if you'd like -- but it still deserves to be slapped down.

Nobody has ever managed to stop troll-thwackery by admonition. People stop responding to trolls when they've had enough -- not because their peers tell them to. This has been the pattern in every fora I've ever posted in, and I began posting in the BBS days.

Bob

Well, first the windup, then the pitch. After all, it's worked for 60 years, why not one more time?

We are so screwed. Imagine a world in which the CIA are the 'liberals'. Well, guess what- we're living in it!

And whatever you do, don't imagine that anybody might plot or scheme- if you do, you become a 'conspiracy nut'. Ower Leaders would never plan anything, they just react when somebody attacks us, or do what God tells them to do.

No sirree bob! No conspiracies here!

Of course, two can play at that "fly-paper" game, and it honestly makes more sense for the Iranians to say: "No need to have long-range ICBMs pointed at America! Keep America in Iraq!" --kokblokat 8:24 PM

With the added bonus that those ICBMs are being launched, according to the report, from Kuwait.

So these same assholes have been issuing the same report ever since the Team B stuff back in the Reagan administration. "The CIA is insufficiently alarmist about the Soviet Union!!!!" they screamed, and a couple of years later everyone was asking why the CIA hadn't told us that the USSR was about to collapse. What a record of accuracy. Then the same crew grows a few years older, and they're doing the same schtick about Iraq under the monicker of the Office of Special Plans. Now it's Iran.

Want to learn more about how Iran is about to gain Nukes? According to the moral forebears of these nimrods, they were originally supposed to get 'em in 1992, and the CIA Just Didn't Get It!!!! Not a big fan of the Cato Institute myself, but when even they are laughing at this crying Wolfowitz bullshit you know the one-handed typists of the 101st koolaid kommandos are getting pretty desperate.

I'm sorry wingnuts, but wake me up when the professionals weigh in, and even then I'll discount it by however much your panicky screaming has caused them to skew the results your way. Because you amateurs haven't been right once in 25 years.

OBF: "I cannot envision a scenario where actually attacking Iran helps the GOP"

Unfortunately, I don't think the neocons care much about the GOP. They've got two+ more years
to make a hit on Iranian nuclear facilities, and my hunch is that they will. I don't know how they expect the American people to fall for the same propaganda stunts performed only three years ago, but maybe they just don't care. They probably see a nuclear armed Iran as a threat they can't ignore. Israel has said just in the last couple days that heck, they may just have to take care of Iran by themselves.

nepeta:

I think both you and OBF are right, sadly enough. That translates to a strike sometime after the '06 elections.

Since Trashhauler appears convinced that it ain't gonna happen, if you're a wagering type you should lay some money on it with him.

Personally, I think you're absolutely right that the neocons are locked in their own private Idaho of Team B and Office of Special Plans-type analyses and they just will *not* take no for an answer, damn the political consequences.

That's why Bush will hold it off for as long as he can -- leaving his successor to clean up the mess.

And a stinking, reeking mess it will be ...

Bob

I sent the following email to Rush Holt today after reading abou thtis on TPM. Unfortunately it got kicked back to me saying his system didn't recognize my address as being in NJ (it's not). So I called his office in DC and went all Lewis Black on his intern, reading my email verbatim and then saying Bush is like taking your two year old over to Aunt Betty's and her house full of antiques and telling him don't touch anything!!! Hoekstra's just as bad. The kid got a chuckle out of it, but I was very serious. Our guys have got to stop
signing off on this crap because they don't want to be called appeasers.

Dear Congressman Holt,

I'm a supporter. I've even gone as far as setting up a meeting with a Jim Saxton aide at his office in Mt. Holly last Sept. trying to get him to co sponsor HR 550. That's why I'm distrissed to find out you signed off on the House Intel report on Iran that seems to be full of inaccuracies and also seems to pave the way for an attack if not full blown war on Iran.

Please note the following from Talking Points Memo today:

(August 24, 2006 -- 11:32 AM EST // link)

Thanks to a reader's observation, I find myself reading the House Intel report (PDF) on Iran and wondering why the missile range graphic shows the missiles being fired from Kuwait rather than, say, Iran. Note also that the outer circles describes the range of a missile that doesn't exist.
-- Matthew Yglesias

Yesterday's NYT had an article saying Republicans are more or less demanding our intelligence agencies cook the books on Iranian Intelligence.

For God's sake man Hoekstra's the guy who along with Santorum tried to peddle those 500 depleted gas shells in Iraq as the WMD we invaded for. Please stop enabling him and the Bush Administration. This is insanity.

Mark Garrity:

Word.

Bob

Here's something I just found in today's Haaretz:

"As part of his new responsibilities, Shkedy will act as "GOC Iran Command": He will oversee battle plans and manage the forces if war breaks out. According to a security source, Shkedy will be the "orchestra conductor," but will coordinate with the Mossad and Military Intelligence, and with the IDF's various operational branches."

What'd ya think? Scare tactics? Hmm...

In case anyone wants the Haaretz link:

Halutz Names Officer To Prepare For Possible War With Iran

I think this is just a coordination of American and Israeli scare tactics. I doubt that it will work with Iran. It's high stake poker, that's for sure.

"According to a security source, Shkedy will be the "orchestra conductor"

What a 'sad' analogy, as if war were a thing of beauty...

Thank you for focusing on the bogus charges by the infidels on the intelligence subcommittee. Iran does not possess any nuclear weapons ;). They are a peaceful nation who only want to defend themselves from the zionists and sunni terrorists.

Campesino -- Sick correctly criticizes the report for falsely claiming that weapons grade uranium enrichment is taking place at Natanz.

Sick incorrectly criticizes the report for the claim that Iran has largest ballistic missle inventory in the Middle East. Iran does have the largest inventory. However, Iran's primary inventory is SRBMs (not IRBMs or MRBMs).

Sick correctly criticizes the report for giving the appearance of an inflated Iranian ballistic missle capability.

Those details aside, Sick hits the bulls-eye with (see here):

The report gives, I think, an exaggerated view of what Iran is actually doing, and then it turns around and criticizes the intelligence services for not coming to the same conclusion that they have come to...

Mark Garrity--

I suppose it should not surprise me that the same people who think that a small UN force could stop weapons shipments across the Lebanese-Syrian border (when thousands of US troops can't stop ANYTHING from flowing into ANY of Iraq's borders) would have such a bad sense of geography that they would put an ICBM icon in Kuwait.

Guys, these people are just DUMB. I hate to say it, but they're not much smarter than your average troll here. It is shocking to see the lack of professionalism and serious analysis that passes for "foreign policy thought" these days. It's a bad day when I feel that I myself could outmaneuver the top foreign policy people in the White House or Congress given a chance in an open debate with no notes and only my own wits. And that doesn't make me happy or proud: it depresses the hell out of me.

Thank you too, Ahmad. Because fortunately possessing nukes and using them are two different things. And the second Iran uses any such weapons is about 15 x 60 seconds before they are turned into a nice shiny glass desert that will never bother anyone ever again. As they well know. So yeah, I'm not as freaked out about the possibility as I'm supposed to be for the greater glory of the GOP.

Perhaps if you kept reading the report, rather than looking at one crudely drawn map, you'd understand how Iran is infiltrating this entire southern Iraqi region.

Yup, agreed, they are. Nice of Bush and the neocons to win their war for them, wasn't it.

Oh and by the way, that Shiite-dominated, Iran-infiltrated region is also the home of the 800-mile supply tail that currently keeps a couple hundred thousand US troops alive in Iraq just now. Another reason Iraq is so unimpressed by US bluster these days. Thank god for the strategic geniuses who thought an aggressive war to occupy Iraq would solve everything.

"...another reason IRAN is so unimpressed..." etc. Ah for an edit feature.

Uh, Thomas1, no one is arguing that Iran doesn't have a great deal of influence in Iraq or that it isn't arming Shia militias who are involved in attacks in Iraq (mostly on Sunni groups, but also sometimes on US troops).

I fail to understand what your point is. Why would we go after the supplier of weapons to Shia militias when we aren't going after the militias themselves? When in fact we have been cynically using the militias as counter-points to the Sunni guerrila insurgency ever since we arrived in Iraq?

DrBB:

Word.

Bob

I don't criticize it. I think it lacks credibility from Iran's p.o.v. whether or not they hold nukes. They're getting everything they want from us, as your previous post makes abundantly clear, so why should they be impressed?

kokblok:

Word.

Thomas:

Nicely ethical of you to source your boilerplate.

Bob

Thomas1--
Are you really that dumb that you don't see the difference between the Iranian government continuing to build nuclear weapons in the face of vague threats of possible targeted US military strikes and the Iranian government actually LAUNCHING such a weapon against US interests in the face of certain nuclear retaliation?

Are you that dumb?

Steve Sailer's got a post up that looks at Iran's tanks and combat aircraft, those being the most crucial parts of its conventional warmaking abilities. Quick summary: Iran's military is a joke, with obsolete tanks and aircraft most of which probably aren't even in working order.

kokblok:

Thomas' deal is to harrass us with rhetorical questions and statements loaded with absurd premises like "unleashing Armageddon."

Underneath that "I voted for Kerry" exterior beats the heart of a neocon clash-of-civilizationist whose faux concern-troll "values agenda" is a front for crystalline Nazoid nihilism.

Bob

Thomas:

Source it *anyway*.

Bob

Thomas:

As simple as writing "From the report:"

Bob

Peter:

Steve Sailer is a right-wing shill.

You might recall that Saddam's military was a "joke," too? Didn't matter much in the final analysis.

Hezbollah, however, not so much.

As you'll also recall, they were trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Oh, and Iran's population is over five times Iraq's.

Bob

We interrupt this exciting episode for a brief message in the interest of historical accuracy:

As captcrisis reminded us out at 7:26 PM, the Iraq war was a sure thing BEFORE Bush talked with Tenet in late 2002.

When Tenet used the expression "slam dunk" the question was not whether there actually were WMDs. Bush, disappointed by Tenet's presentation, had just asked if that was all the proof the CIA had. Bush said he was concerned whether it was enough to convince Joe Public.

Tenet said it was a slam dunk, and he was absolutely right.

ergonaut:

Much to his undying chagrin ...

Bob

Just another example of political expediency that generates suspicion. It would be beneficial to have reason to believe our intelligence community is up to the task. Something never or rarely questioned before 9/11.

I like to think that the absence of a subsequent
attack is due to getting ahead of the curve rather
than a lack of interest by terrorists. Satisfied to ply their trade on softer targets.

Saddam Hussein's refusal to be up front about WMD was explained as reluctance to display weakness to neighboring countries. Could Iran be using a similar tactic?

On the news today, a think tank member who studies nuclear proliferation, reminded me of "Red" China and its image at the time compared to Iran. But when they got nukes, "they became responsible" even with threatening rhetoric beforehand.

Peter -- Steve Sailer's assessment of Iran's "warmaking" focuses on offensive capabilities, with no regard for how different offensive and defensive capabiltiies would apply given the differing goals and positions of the combatants. And regardless of how much some may think Iran's military is a "joke", a war with Iran is not.

If you want a real assessment, see Iran's Evolving Military Forces, Anthony Cordesman, 2004, Center for Strategic and International Studies.

If you want to understand the implications, see The Challenges of U.S. Preventative Military Action, Michael Eisenstadt, in Checking Iran's Nuclear Ambitions, 2004, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College.

has407:

Well-parried.

Thanks for fleshing out my gut intuitions with solid sorces.

Bob

Steve Sailer was, of course, pointing out that Iran is not up to conquering anyone, is not even preparing that kind of military capability - and is thus no threat. Which is not what the right-wing shills are saying. You want right-wing shills, look to NR or _The Weekly Standard_.

They'd rather pimp for war than have a hot date with Scarlett Johanssen.

gcochran:

Well-taken point. I should've really read Sailer first before characterizing the post.

It's just that Sailer pops in here every so often with his bell curve-esque takes on immigration -- so I just have this impression of him as a Mickey Kausoid "Democrat" concern troll type.

Bob

So, I share Sick's question, what was the motivation for rushing the report out yesterday? What's the rush?

I say this in all seriousness...Who is Laura posing these questions to at the end of her posts? Is this just her way of trying to stimulate comments (obviously unnecessary here). Or, is she truly implying she isn't sure why this was rushed out? Does she still describe herself as a neutral journalist or is she an opinion blogger. The only reason I could see for posing these questions in the way is to maintain a veneer of neutrality, but I think it actually comes off worse.

Laura provides a lot of good information, but I can't tell if these are rhetorical or real questions?

Peter--

Well, if Iran's military has enough RPG-27s (29s? I confess I'm not a hardware guy) to send surplus to Lebanon, I would say it is definately not a "joke", at least in defensive terms.

Why don't you ask the IDF Merkava drivers what a "joke" those RPG-27s are?

The Iranians, unlike the Iraqis, would actually be pretty united in fighting against us. I don't share the point of view that the US military is invincible, even in the conventional sense. Of course, we could easily destroy Iran if we resorted to genocide.

But actually, we couldn't even REALLY do that, since we would quickly become a pariah in the eyes of the world at large and would soon be kicked out of every military base from Tokyo to Tierra del Fuego.

In any normal, controlled conflict in Iran, there is a good chance that we would actually lose on the battlefield. And I mean in the sense that we lost in Vietnam, not in the sense that we are losing in Iraq.

Stanford Matthews: "Saddam Hussein's refusal to be up front about WMD was explained as reluctance to display weakness to neighboring countries."

I sure don't remember Saddam's refusal to be up front about WMD. He said many times that Iraq had no WMD.

An invasion of Iran - every red-blooded neocon's wet dream - would of course be a disaster. That does NOT mean, however, that Iran has the ability to conquer all of the Middle East, as some have claimed. Their tanks aren't going to be rolling through the streets of Tel Aviv or Riyadh anytime soon. What we have in the case of Iran is a huge mismatch between defensive and offensive capabilities.

gcochran -- Sailer says that "most of the Iranian fear-mongering takes place in a mental world devoid of numbers...", which includes a link to his "The Iranian War Machine" post.

Sailer effectively states that the fear-mongering is strongly fueld by a misunderstanding of Iran's conventional capabilities and the threat that they'll use that capability to conquer the neighbors. It is not.

Then, in the "The Iranian War Machine", he shows how weak Iran's conventional capabilities are. He does not discriminate between offensive or defensive capabilities, or consider unconventional capabitiles, although he limits his analysis to offensive capabilities. He thus reinforces the perception that a US attack on Iran would involve little pain for us.

In short, he created a strawman and knocked it down using dangerously misleading arguments and data. He deserves a good spanking.

nepata--
Saddam Hussein said all kinds of things about WMD. It seemed like he was sort of confused himself about the right thing to say. He did deny having them, but he also didn't try very hard to prove that he didn't have them. I think he was trying to keep it a little ambiguous, because he probably figured that the US was either going to attack or not for its own reasons and that the fact that he had WMDs or not would make no difference either way. In the meantime, better to scare off "lesser" powers by claiming to have them.

In turns out he was correct in his judgement but he guessed the wrong way. The WMDs didn't matter. He could have been totally forthcoming and it still wouldn't have mattered. The US went to war over the objections of the UN, the same body that the WMD bullshit was designed for.

Peter--

Totally agreed.

has407 & kokblok:

Excellent points.

Bob

Thanks, Bob
I gotta go to bed now, though...

he also didn't try very hard to prove that he didn't have them.

I seem to remember a document dump of monumental proportions in Dec 2002 that was dismissed out of hand by this Administrationand inspectors given basically full access to his country...that struck me as trying pretty hard...or were you referring to the time prior to the final UN resolution

Kokblok,

Well, I still stand by my memory of Saddam asserting that Iraq had no WMD. In the last round of UN inspections, Saddam's palaces were open to inspectors and they were given free rein to check anywhere without prior authorization.
It seems to me that the written report listing destroyed WMD, etc., was what caused doubt that Saddam was telling the truth since some WMD were unaccounted for in the report, or at least that was the storyline.

Thanks for the corroboration, justmy2.

I find this interesting (from the Dafna Linzer article):
Jamal Ware, spokesman for House intelligence committee, said three staff members wrote the report, but he did not dispute that the principal author was Frederick Fleitz...

Didn't Fleitz help put together Bolton's 2002 speech to the Heritage Foundation about Cuba's supposed bioweapons program that turned out to be pharmaceuticals research?

Bob -- Thanks & good night.

p.s. The companion piece to Checking Iran's Nuclear Ambitions is Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran, both worth checking out.

to has 407:

You are too stupid to notice that someone is agreeing with you. Iran can't threaten territoral aggression without a conventional offensive capacity, and they don't have any, as Steve pointed out.
It's hard to be a threat when you can't successfully attack anyone, nicht wahr?
As for unconventional attacks, their power is limited. I think Iran could shut off all Iraqi oil exports, but I doubt if they could do a lot more than that for any length of time. Except for blocking their own oil exports, of course.

As for what would happen if we invaded and occupied Iran: we'd win every battle. Don't kid yourself - JDAMS. Iran lost the conventional war to Iraq, remember? - and how did Iraq do against us? Transitivity.
And we'd lose the war, disastrously so: probably a bigger disaster than any in our history. We would control the ground under out boots and nothing else. We'd be playing whack-a-mole for two generations, telling ourselves magical lies about our latest set of puppets, torturing to get false information, murdering farmers in fury and frustration, explaining that everything would be ok if we could just occupy Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan ('outside agitators'). There's a fair chance it would end up destroying constitutional goverment, what's left of it - remember the Paras?

It would likely destroy our position as a superpower, as Brzezinski has noted.

As for the typical neocon argument that Iran is lusting for Armageddon: that's even more stupid.

The neocon nutjobs who are trying to rush us into a war with Iran are the same criminals who rushed us into a needless war with Iraq and the same group of liars from “Team B” that exaggerated the Soviet threat in the 1980s. They all belong in prison – not in the U.S. government!!!

How to recognize the neocon trolls and their talking points:

Describing the leadership of Iran as a "death cult."

I'm seeing it on several blogs since the beginning of the roll-out of the 06 campaign.

Iran lost the conventional war to Iraq, remember?

The Iraqis were losing the Iran-Iraq war, until Saddam resorted to poison gas. Saddam is now on trial for genocide and war crimes because of his use of poison gas.

Would US neocons resort to tactical nukes in a similar situation?

Think about it.

Remember folks, it was the human slime known as Dick Cheney that outed Valerie Plame, who was working on Iran’s nuclear capability when Cheney, Rove, Libby, et al, committed treason by subverting Plame’s valuable work. When the Dems take back the Senate in November, this should be the first investigation undertaken, and Cheney should be dragged by his pacemaker to the well of the Senate to answer for his crimes.

Frederick Fleitz, the author of the House Intelligence report on Iran, is a neo-con ninja with a license to kill. He is Bolton's "mole" on the Hill. He quit the CIA because it did not share his apocalyptic zeal or "connect the dots" to prove Saddam's WMD or 9/11 role. In 2002, he co-authored many tracts to promote the US intervention in Iraq. He retains security clearance and can chide or disgrace intelligence analysts who "fail to the the message" and come up with sinister reports on Iran. Did he tell Bolton and Cheney about Plame? Any connections to Perle, Ledeen, Rubin, Feith? Are we on the road to "Shock & Awe U235"?

gcochran -- Ok, my fault for not clearly articulating the points of agreement and disagreement. Or at least what I think those points are.

I agree with the conclusion that fear-mongering based on Iran's conventional offensive military capabilities is stupid. (However, I also believe that the amount of such fear-mongering is minimal, or at least of minimal import, based on what's coming out of the DOD, the White House, and Congress.)

I disagree with the conclusion that Iran is a not necessarily a threat to the region, or that Iran's ability to adversely and significantly influence the region is seriously constrained, based on Iran's conventional offensive military capabilities.

p.s. And I disagree with Sailer's assessment of Iran's conventional offensive military capability. Yes, aircraft and tanks are significant. However, a glance at the numbers of troops and supporting equipment Iran could put in the field, and their modernization efforts (albeit patchy), should and does scare the shit out of states in the region.