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| User Info | Oh No..... (To The US Government - This Is No Joke); entered at 2009-12-07 22:50:01 | |||
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Joe-bob Posts: 2619 Registered: 2007-09-18 
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Of course they will arm Iran - China and Russia like oil & money, just like the rest of us. I'm reminded, reading dinner-jacket's words, (thanks pika) that it doesn't take long historically for religion to go from a reason in its own right to a matter of expediency. If you look at the medieval through renaissance leaders in Europe, you can see them couching things in a religious frame - sometimes in a very radical-sounding way. But the elites were always that 0.000001% of the population that was educated - I'm sure most of them viewed the use of such rhetoric with a healthy amount of cynicism. The leaders of the Greek successor-states (Seleucid, Antigonid, Ptolmaic, etc) used to talk tough and run a few raids on the Galatians (the Gauls) on a regular basis pretty much so they could stamp a nice victory pattern on the new coinage to boast what heroes they were. Images of themselves wearing lion-skins as a pseudo-Heracles etc. Beating up Israel verbally is sort of an obligatory "raid" if you want to establish yourself as a prospective leader of the Islamic/Arab bloc. Iran probably IS naturally the regional power. Not a US or USSR by any means, but a strong regional power. It COULD all be bluster. Get a little street cred basically for almost no cost. I really don't see them as a cat's-paw for Russia or China. They want to carve out their own niche. That said, you can't threaten someone with violence and not expect them to respond. The threat is essentially equivalent to the actual deed. lol maybe there's a secret envoy telling the Israelis "Dude, our guy just needs some street cred - we don't mean it. Just be cool okay, please?" You can't blame the Israelis if they do something in response to the public threat - they can always point to public statements. Personally I think the Iranians will, like everyone else, function on the basis of political expediency. Bravado fits into that too. However IF THEY DID want to do some nuclear damage, their best bet would be to take out a carrier group with a nuke. As a purely military target with a zero civilian death toll, it's a good chance the US would not retaliate by nuking a city full of civilians... they'd just conventionally destroy every aqueduct, bridge, highway, reservoir, power plant, telephone exchange, library, police station, etc until they were back in the 600's. BC. And what have they really gained then? And that is the BEST cost-benefit exchange they can hope for on a nuclear-use basis. Last modified: 2009-12-08 00:02:01 by joe-bob
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