The Al Anbar Awakening would not particularly care about Iran getting attacked by the US or not. The Shia Sons of Iraq will be happy to see Iran too busy with the US to send fighters into Basra and to Sadr city to help Sadr.

Instead of “wondering” about what reactions other people will have by assuming they will react as your neighbors, why don’t you think about what Iran’s pre-emptive attack of Iraqi Shias mean.

This, coming from a guy that can’t even figure out that he is projecting his ad hominem tendencies on his political opponents, is not exactly a thing that inspires trust and confidence when dealing with world affairs.

All wars involve real loss of life, even the ones that have bloodless battles.

Also, I don’t mean to generalize comments on this blog and attribute one poster’s comments to another; however, Wolf did write the following comment: “…the history and current trajectory of Iran is that it is expansionist and refuses to forego its goals. Indeed, I see little to distinguish it from Germany in 1938, either in tone or in existentail threat.” Hence, I drew the conclusion that Iran today is viewed as Germany in ‘38.

Finally, the Iraq War is not a sheathed sword strategy, since it involves real loss of American lives, real taxation of our military and Treasury coffers. It may serve as a deterrent in other arenas and thus avoid a hot war there, but this is a debatable point and not the kind of strategy that Sun Tzu meant by sheathed swords. Sun Tzu was highly concerned about the negative impact of war on the unity of society and the health of the state–more so than more contemporary military writers, which is a major reason he is viewed as a genious universally–and so the fact that these political fissures are occuring and the costs are rising reflect the very negatives that he sought to avoid by preventing a hot war in the first place.

I don’t have any great answers to your query for solutions. If I did, I wouldn’t be sharing them on this blog, but would be on a plane to D.C., as would you I suspect. I would agree that economic sanctions are a good idea, and believe that only the U.S. can strong-arm Europe into pursuing this course. It should be supplemented with generous aid to the Red Crescent, so children do not starve due to those sanctions. Also, I agree with Condi Rice’s call for more targeted support to moderate, democratic elements in the country. Finally, I think we should be willing to offer generous carrots to bring the Iranians to the table. They could run out of oil for export within decade or two, according to some research I’ve read, so they might be willing to repond to economic incentives more willingly than many Americans believe. I am now reading a lot about Dubai, which is an economic miracle as impressive as Singapore but occuring in a country with a substantial population of fundamentalist Muslims, and I wonder what lessons might lie there for spreading that brand of home-grown prosperity to Iran, Iraq and Syria, in the way that Singapore’s model has been adopted in China.

You often won’t have the human intelligence necessary to kill the terrorists and you will expend hundreds in casualties with kinetic operations that will run into quagmires left and right because the terrorists know their home country/terrain better than you and they have the support of local human intel and you don’t.

You also often won’t have the support of the foreign government controlling the area and even if you did have the support of the foreign government, as in Pakistan, oftentimes the foreign government lack the tools and military power to do jack even if they wanted to.

Iraq is a distraction alright; it is a distraction for people that want to leave terrorists alone while negotiating with the political leaders that are protecting the terrorists living in their territory.

Without Iraq, the United States government would be petitioning, on hands and knees, the supporters of terrorism while hoping that once negotiations are completed and the requisite human sacrifice have been offered up to the mullahs or Saudi Princes, that they will do something about the terrorists in their territory. Compare this with the “distraction of Iraq”, where we don’t have to negotiate with anybody on whether we need to kill terrorists or not, where we have the support of the local population and thus acquires human intel, where we have the support the local government as well as the federal government, and where we don’t need Musharaff, Amanie’s, or the Saudi Princes’ approval to conduct kinetic killings when we see a target. In addition, American logistics and forces are training and improving the quality of Iraqi guards and army members, thus providing the locals as well as the national government of Iraq the tools to which they can then use to help us, if they wish.

On another note, consider the proposal by people smoking H2O bong water that Saudi Arabia made just as good a target to invade as Iraq.

For the most case, they are kidding and lying in order to make a point. For those that are serious, meaning they really hate the Saudi Princes and the madrassas that have been funded inside the United State or the rest of the world, they must consider various factors in the way of success.

For one thing, Saudi Arabia has Mecca and Medina, to which the terrorists, Sunni or Shia, may use to stoke up Islamic rage. That in itself isn’t too much of a problem, but imagine trying to take back Fallujah or Sadr city, only that those two cities are Mecca and Medina? The ROE limitations would have killed hundreds of Marines, hundreds more than would have died. The various ROE limitations on mosques, which the terrorists used as sniper nests and munitions dumps? Oh, those would have been used in Saudi Arabia as well, except the majority population will be Sunni, not Iraqi Shia, and thus will turn on Americans far faster and easier in enmass due to Islamic propaganda about American defilment of Mosques. Far more international support would have been on the side of the Saudis, precisely because Saudi Arabia has money to spare for bribes.

If Saudi Arabia must be taken down because they have lots of oil wealth to fund madrassas in the West, then what makes you think that they haven’t already bought the loyalty of at least half the State Department? Is there a better way to spend that black gold?

So, not only would we have faced the twin obstacles of Medina and Mecca, Islamic rage, international disapproval and sabotage of US policy, we would also have faced internal sabotage on a scale even greater than occurred concerning Weapons of Mass Destruction in the UN.

If people think Americans are getting weak spined on Iraq, they should see what happens if Iraq had been replaced with Saudi Arabia. There were no Kurds in Saudi Arabia, so there weren’t even any local allies that one could depend upon for reinforcement, supply, moral support, or advice. All of America’s ignorance concerning Arabs seen in OIF would have been quadrupled in Saudi Arabia, for, after all, are not the Saudis the best at using the West’s ignorance of Islam against the West?

As far as Iraq being a so-called distraction from the war on Al Qaeda - it seems that the “flypaper” strategy has working perfectly well as intended: Iraq draws Al Qaeda from all over the world to die in Iraq rather than having us root them out from under every rock in every far-flung corner of the globe, requiring us to invade other countries (Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan) in the process. Do these critics really think through what the alternatives would/should be?

Sure beats Clinton’s strategy of having us take potshots at remote corners of world like Afghanistan and Somalia, only to turn tail and run as soon as they shoot back, I would think.

I thought it took quite a lot of guts to have Asians killed in another country. It also took some will to ensure that American POWs were treated worse because America had totally abandoned their allies in Vietnam which could punish the North for bad treatment, which meant they could anything to Americans and free quite safe from retribution.

“The Iraq War hasn’t made us safer, because we now know since Saddam lacked the WMDs that were supposedly threatening us, but the current war is seriously taxing our military and distracting us from fighting Al-Qaeda”

You may think war is a Starbucks in which you can take your time selecting your specific “flavor”, in which any type of distraction negatively affects your ability to choose, but it really isn’t.

Unlike Starbucks, you don’t get a choice of fighting or not fighting, drinking or not drinking, choosing or not choosing.

All plans fall before the enemy and fighting isn’t about avoiding distractions. Fighting is about dealing with distractions as reality and knowing that distractions are often just enemy action.

The fog of war demands greater attention from you, EC, then your idea that a war will not tax America’s military or distract us.