The counter to that would be to drive through and link Iraq and Afghanistan, via the coast, and destroy every Iranian naval logistical point

Now THAT is strategic thinking! Hit em where it hurts. Every time they try to take it back, quite easy if brutal to stop them. They might try a rain of missiles should our forces be arrayed in relatively limited terroritory geographically… but even in that scenario, I bet there would be standard military actions to handle the risk.

And such a rain of missiles would render the oil fields inoperable anyway. Iran, for example, has absolutely no capability of repairing that kind of destruction should they cause it. In effect there would be absolutely nothing Iranian leadership could do to recover from that strategic stroke.

In a sense, I think what you’ve proposed, Ymar, is as revolutionary a concept as terrorism. Terrorism works against us because the enemy is a shadow enemy striking at us via fear, and fighting that enemy destabilizes our democratic ideals.

Since our enemy relies on oil as its sole valuable resource, simply occupy your enemy’s most valuable natural resource and dare them to figure out a solution. Asymmetrical warfare at its finest! How the liberals would scream, how the U.N. would scream. UNFAIR! UNFAIR! The Arab Street would seethe in ways it has never seethed before! As MadTV’s Leona would say, “Oh my Goodness! That’s a lot of seething!”

Both. In war, however, even the simplest things are very hard to do. It is something called friction and it is part of the Fog of War or otherwise known as the Butterfly Effect in Chaos Theory.

Ending a bad political system that is a theocracy, tightly woven into the religious society itself, must be a much more difficult undertaking

Not if they have an alternative political system that can fill the gap. Khomeini didn’t always rule in Iran, after all.

But the problem of defeating the Mullohcracy of Iran – and purging it – does it have a simple answer?

You can always cut it up into 10 different parts. They’ll never represent a danger once their nation has been separated into that many pieces. They’ll have a common culture called “Persian” but without the political unity to do anything with it. Sort of like the Arabs.

The one thing funding these problems is oil. So take those oil fields away from them. Annex the territory and then defend it, then take that oil and ship it to the people who need. Like us.

Occupying some oil fields and pipelines is always going to be easier than occupying an entire nation.

Ymar, simple in concept or in execution? I’d love to see a well-written novel come out, right now – fiction at this point – about a U.S. war against Iran. Something along the lines of Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising”, which was exciting but not particularly well-written… But that would be good enough for me.

Ending a bad political system and purging it from a society (ie the Nazis or the Japanese military machine in WWII) is hard enough. Ending a bad political system that is a theocracy, tightly woven into the religious society itself, must be a much more difficult undertaking, I would think. How would you purge it? Part of the reason the Surge succeeded in Iraq is because Al Qaeda made the critical mistake of not integrating themselves with their Sunni “allies” – indeed Al Qaeda deliberately antagonized them, to our own great benefit.

What would have happened had Al Qaeda honored their potential Sunni allies? Of course, asking that question is like asking, “What if pigs had flown?” Why ask rhetorical questions not grounded in any semblance of reality? Al Qaeda honoring anyone but their own, anyone at all… ha! ha!

But the problem of defeating the Mullohcracy of Iran – and purging it – does it have a simple answer?

The Shah released prisoners and tried to reform the system in Iran and make things prosperous for Iran and look what he got. Khomeini produced a Reign of Terror, make things worse in Iran economically, and increased repression and he got to stay in power and produce an entire dynasty of Mullah successors.

The world is a bad place because bad people keep on living. There is a very simple cure to that, however.

It would have been grand to see people reap what they sowed. No higher justice could have been produced for these individuals than to have the Khomeini regime execute them. But the universe is an unjust place and that is why Jimmy Carter is still alive and supporting dictators while Reagan is dead and why Khomeini’s supporters here in the US still have power and influence now that Iran, once again, producing a crisis.

The same is true for individuals that seek to defend themselves against those that would hurt them, whether the attackers be Islamic Jihad, organized crime, or those with a grudge. If you don’t know your own weaknesses and how to exploit them, then you are categorically unable to “defend” yourself.

Because I know where and how a human being can be injured, maimed, or killed, I know how to defend myself. I cannot make myself immune to such things, because that is impossible, but I can defend myself. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that my ability to decide how to defend myself is going to actually produce the results I want rather than the unintended results of Murphy.

Iraq has proven that Obama, the Democrats, and the Left all have no idea how to defend this nation or cover up our weaknesses. If you knew your own weaknesses so well and have successfully defended those weak points from the enemy, you would also have known what to do about other people’s weaknesses. The Democrats did not know, however. But not only that, even if they did know, even if they were programmed with the Soviet Union’s knowledge of how to exploit the weaknesses of democracies, they would have refused to help us defend America and Iraq from the enemies of humanity. I’ll let you decide what proportion of people are the former vs the latter here in America.

What this tends to mean for Book’s topic post is that maniacs that spend their entire lives learning how to destroy a system and blow it up, will not know how to use power legitimately or to use power to defend and build things back up. This is not a matter of “choice”. It is a simple matter of reality, as ironbound as the physics of the universe, at least the parts we know about. People that know how to destroy a system will not know how to build that system back up. Why? because they didn’t give a damn about any of that in the first place, so why should they when they are the ones with the power and the legitimacy to use it?

This is why the Soviets got rid of those people as fast as possible once their use was up. You don’t want a bunch of terrorize around in your territory once you have seized power. Those guys do not know the meaning of “peaceful transition of power”. They also don’t know the meaning of compromise. And when some of those people realize that the Soviets had made dupes of them, they would ultimately turn against the Soviets and the Communist cause and use their knowledge of how to make bombs and kill people against the Soviet Communists. We can’t have that, now can we.