Well, if the US had wanted to do it properly, it would have invoked the Wilsonian Doctrine and split Iraq back into the constituent ethno-tribal parts whence it had came. The whole country was an artificial state to begin with, an artifact from a previous Great Power era when borders were redrawn at a whim by men in top hats, coats and tails. Of course, the situations in Turkey and Iran made this impossible; the Kurdish north would have become, like it or not, a state which would have been at eternal war with Turkey over the creation of a Greater Kurdistan, and the south would have fallen under the sway of Iran, and become little more than a puppet state.
But this isn't revisionism. As the first stages of the 2nd Gulf War were taking place, both American and foreign military experts and military historians were saying "You're not putting enough troops on the ground." The Bush Administration was warned repeatedly that the forces were insufficient to guarantee security, both for American troops and other American interests and for the Iraqi people. You didn't see the Romans marching into Gaul, Britain or North Africa with just enough legions to topple the local warlords and tribal chieftains. They marched enough with enough legions to impose the victors' rule. It may seem anachronistic to invoke successful conquering powers like Rome (or even later ones like the Ottomans, the French or the British), but whatever your rationale (and it's not like American motives were pure anyways), the rules stay the same. Victory and occupation are two different objectives, and you do not get from victory to occupation without the boots on the ground to impose it.
I don't think it's revisionism at all to say that GWB screwed it up. Experts said he was screwing it up, I suspect his own military advisers knew he was screwing it up. Considering that even as America withdraws, Iraq is poised on the brink of a civil war, we all can assuredly say that it would have been better if the invasion had never happened. An Iraq plunged into civil war will mean a huge amount of instability in a region already shaking from the Arab Spring and from a looming collision with Iran. Past Administrations, I think, would have been pragmatic, and continued with the devils they knew. Certainly GWB's father did, even as he watched Hussein gassing Kurds, because the alternatives were far worse. It's that alternative we have been witnessing for the last eight years, and likely will continue to witness for years to come.
Any of these acts constitutes acts of war, and would give the US carte blanche to do whatever it liked. If oil production in these countries is interfered with, or the ability to transport them is blocked, China would be harshly impacted and would most certainly withdraw even its now lukewarm support. Such moves on Iran's part would amount to an act of suicide, because US military power would wipe out most of its military capacity, would likely all but destroy the Ayatollahs' regime. You think I'm kidding, just ask the Japanese and the Germans how well they fared under Allied bombing campaigns (culminating in the A bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Iran's infrastructure is already in piss poor shape from three decades of utter mismanagement by the Ayatollahs' regime, and would be trivially easy to completely obliterate by the US airforce and navy. And what exactly could Iran do? Much of its military is relatively poorly equipped, and elements like the Basij would be about as effective as if they all ran into battle naked. You can be damned sure that the US and other Powers know where all its airbases are, and initial strikes would render its air power useless, and after that, it's just a lot of air campaigning.
I can't imagine the Iranian regime surviving more than a few months, and more likely I suspect the actual Iranian Army would probably seize control of the situation. The Basij would prove no resistance to them, and the Revolutionary Guard, while likely well equipped, is insufficient in numbers to actual to ever be a real threat to the Iranian Army.
Could you specify what allies are? Iran has damned few allies when push comes to shove, and if Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, what little shelter China and Russia care to offer will be revoked. Iran is on a tightwire. As long as it doesn't do anything overtly hostile that could damage oil shipments, it gets sort of a pass (for the moment), but the minute it tries to project its force in this way, it loses any alliance really fast.
Indeed, people keep talking about how China somehow owns the US Treasury, when the fact is that the US and the other industrialized nations have the capacity to completely decimate the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is being built on exports, a larger scale version of how Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand built up their economies. China's economy is largely reliant on global appetite for its manufactured goods. If that truly nose dives for any length of time, Chinese holdings of US debt are rather irrelevant, and it would mean a massive drop off in exports, which would hammer the living crap out of the economy.
China is trying to deal with this by growing a middle class sufficient to at least keep things at heartbeat level in the case of a protracted global downturn, but it's years away from this, with a huge proportion of its population still basically living at a rural agrarian level and most certainly nowhere near the level where they can become consumers of the kind needed to keep the factories running. And let's also remember here that countries like the US still have a vast wealth of raw materials, and the decline in industrial output could be reversed if need be, as Lend-Lease demonstrated.
China is an important global power, and certainly it is racing to be the number one economy sometime this century, but I don't think people realize how fragile that growth is, and how utterly dependent China is on foreign markets to keep the ball rolling.
Yup, China will no more stand for the Strait of Hormuz being closed off than the US. The chief difference is that China doesn't have a navy sufficient to project its force, so it will happily let the US do the heavy lifting if Iran attempts a blockade.
It's not about things going bad between your trading partners, it's about your trade, your national lifeblood, being damaged by foreign conflicts. The US didn't become a wealthy powerful nation because it stayed home, it did so because it pursued foreign markets. Any state, particularly one so reliant on commerce, who just lets things happen while it remains theoretically neutral is going to become completely dependent on foreign powers (as the Swiss are, they have neither the population nor the economic base sufficient to support a mass military, and thus, as the saying goes, rely on the kindness of strangers).
The US cannot afford to stay out of the Strait of Hormuz. It cannot afford to allow one of the major oil transport routes to be cut off by Iran. Neither, for that matter, can anyone else. Oil is an international commodity, whether any of us like it or not, and as I said, no matter how isolationist any Administration is, those commerce choke points (like, for instance, the Suez or Panama Canals) must remain open or the national interest is severely compromised.
I agree. The Strait is too important to US interests to allow any power, particularly one that is so ill-prepared to actually hold it, seize the Strait of Hormuz. Let's remember here that the US was largely isolationist in WWI right up until the point that the Germans refused to stop indiscriminate submarine attacks on trans-Atlantic shipping. Keeping one's nose out of foreign conflicts is only really possible where one has no dog in the race. The US since it's very foundation been a mercantile power, and whether it is the Royal Navy impressing American seaman, Barbary pirates raiding US merchant ships, or the Ayatollahs of Iran, US foreign policy has consistently boiled down to "don't fuck with our shipping."
Do you think even an isolationist Administration would let a second-rate power basically put a choke hold on the Strait of Hormuz? One can well imagine just about any President ordering ships into the area to assure safe conduct of merchant traffic.
Iran is the one that started this round, a lot of bluster because of sanctions. Honestly, I suspect there's already more than enough assets in and around the Persian Gulf to wallop Iran very hard indeed
I tend to be of two minds about the the second Gulf War. On the one hand, it's hard to justify in any legal sense, and the contortions the Bush Administration had to go through to justify it, including what amounted to deliberately misinterpreted intelligence data, undermined it early on. At the same time, I can't imagine anyone feeling bad that Hussein was taken out. The chief criticism I have of the Bush Administration isn't the invasion of Iraq, but rather that it was botched. There should have been far more troops sent in. In the grand scale of things, it's relatively easy for a Great Power to knock out a smaller country's government. Building a new government, however, requires the forces necessary to project the victor's will. There has to be substantial subjugation; as was the case of Germany and Japan after WWII. In both cases, the victors literally had the option of massive forces to stamp out any attempted uprising, not to mention being able to function as a government until such time as the civil government apparatus could be restored.
In Iraq, enough troops were sent in to smash Hussein's regime, but not enough were sent in to either stamp out an insurgency, or to serve in a sufficient capacity as a government (including, very importantly, serving as a proper police force). There weren't enough technical experts brought in to restore basic services in a timely manner, so that after the initial goodwill of the fall of Hussein, people found themselves in even worse shape than they had been before the invasion, which rapidly expended any goodwill that the US might have had. It was an incompetent invasion by what I would consider to be politically-masterful morons; quite capable of bamboozling Congress and the American people, at using all the techniques of media manipulation, but when push came to shove, being utterly and completely out of their depth in actually managing a proper occupation of a foreign state.
I don't think Bush, Cheney and their neo-con advisors should be taken out back and shot because they invaded Iraq, I think they should be taken out back and shot because they are profoundly stupid men. If you're going to invade and occupy, then bloody well do it, push the assets through to make it work, otherwise stay at home. Any one of these idiots could have opened up a history book and seen how it's been done successfully, and yet they were fools to a man.
If Iran blockades the Strait, political will won't be a problem. No matter what you think of war and peace, globalism and economics, the reality is that a blockade of one of the most important waterways on the planet will most assuredly bring a firestorm to Iran, one that that country could not hope to weather.
That is an entirely different kind of war. You can have overwhelming forces, and yet a guerrilla-style war will still leave a major power floundering. It happened to Napoleon in Spain, and aspects of the Vietnam War heavily resembled similar tactics. At the same time, you can kill an insurgency, The Brits did it in Malaysia, though it took years to do it.
The Strait of Hormuz is of key global economic importance. If Iran attempts a blockade there will be a war, and a very short one. Iran is very good at bluster, but all the Basij in the world won't mean a bloody thing if the US turns its military assets towards liberating the Strait. I wouldn't assume this would be a war of occupation, like Iraq, but more along the lines of a "welcome to the Stone Age assholes." And you know what, because the Strait is so important, at least the other Western powers are not going to make a lot of noise. Maybe China and Russia will get cranky, but that's about it. A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz will immediately separate Iran from its few remaining friends.
Which is why I don't think it will happen. Blockading a major international waterway is a short route to Iran being pummeled badly. They cannot win. They could, I suppose, cause considerable damage to, say, Israel, but doing that would almost certainly give the US and its allies carte blanche to do whatever they liked.
It depends. I have an old provider-locked LG Keybo which only allows direct installs from their own website. Trivially easy to hack with Bitpim, of course, and I can just copy.jar files to the internal file system and it's menu picks them up right away. I dispensed with the shitty Openwave browser and put on Opera Mini, as well as the Albrite reader which does a nice job with epub books, and it works great. Unfortunately the keyboard is showing wear-and-tear and I'll have to upgrade to an iPhone or Android, but I have to say that with a little hacking my old critter is a great little phone.
Yes, I'm sure foreign navies could sink US naval assets, but the overall US military capacity is sufficiently advanced that it would simply be an example of winning a battle and losing the war.
If Iran did sink or heavily damage some US ships, it would suck, but the US has the military capacity to devastate Iran, to wipe out much of its military capacity. Iran does not have the naval or support capacity to hold the strait.
I get what you're saying, but the only time the Tolkien Estate sues is when someone tries to write some new material within Tolkien's mythos, and even Tolkien, in his later years refused permission to derivative works. If the Estate truly did try to sue everyone who wrote about elves or dwarves, a fairly big chunk of fantasy written in the last half century would be eradicated.
Not that I'm defending the Tolkien Estate, but they're using the laws that the politicians have put in place. If copyright was what it had been half a century ago, the Estate could do nothing if some guy decided to write a sequel to the Lord of the Rings.
All that counts is whether you have the legal clout to stare down the other guy. It has nothing to do with what is right or what is strictly legal. It's pure brinkmanship. What counts in almost every case is how deep your pockets are, frivolousness or abusiveness of lawsuits is only meaningful in the size of the check you can write to your lawer. Sad sometimes when the IP game detrimentally affects the most vulnerable people in society, but this is America, the land where the lawyer laws you!
I'm sorry, I have patented the process of creating new posts, and you'll have to pay me for each one you make. I'm a reasonable man, unlike those copyright goons, and I'll only charge $0.73.
No one expects journalism to give us complete technical breakdowns, but science journalism has a nasty history of not just skimming over important details, but also of out-and-out sensationalism. Take your average report on some hominid fossil discovery, which by the time it gets through the editorial department has a headline "Map Of Human Evolution Redrawn!"
They're actually saying that the poor performance of the Hollywood version of Dragon Tattoo is due to the fact that fans already saw the Swedish version, and feel no particular need to watch it again.
I felt much the same way about Nikita. The original French version is a fantastic film, and the Hollywood remake, while well done, was really quite superfluous.
Slashdot Mirror
"Salesperson" is a nice new euphamism for "enforcer".
Kim Jong-un has higher approval ratings than Congress. But Congress doesn't care, because the electorate doesn't have the will to punish them.
Well, if the US had wanted to do it properly, it would have invoked the Wilsonian Doctrine and split Iraq back into the constituent ethno-tribal parts whence it had came. The whole country was an artificial state to begin with, an artifact from a previous Great Power era when borders were redrawn at a whim by men in top hats, coats and tails. Of course, the situations in Turkey and Iran made this impossible; the Kurdish north would have become, like it or not, a state which would have been at eternal war with Turkey over the creation of a Greater Kurdistan, and the south would have fallen under the sway of Iran, and become little more than a puppet state.
But this isn't revisionism. As the first stages of the 2nd Gulf War were taking place, both American and foreign military experts and military historians were saying "You're not putting enough troops on the ground." The Bush Administration was warned repeatedly that the forces were insufficient to guarantee security, both for American troops and other American interests and for the Iraqi people. You didn't see the Romans marching into Gaul, Britain or North Africa with just enough legions to topple the local warlords and tribal chieftains. They marched enough with enough legions to impose the victors' rule. It may seem anachronistic to invoke successful conquering powers like Rome (or even later ones like the Ottomans, the French or the British), but whatever your rationale (and it's not like American motives were pure anyways), the rules stay the same. Victory and occupation are two different objectives, and you do not get from victory to occupation without the boots on the ground to impose it.
I don't think it's revisionism at all to say that GWB screwed it up. Experts said he was screwing it up, I suspect his own military advisers knew he was screwing it up. Considering that even as America withdraws, Iraq is poised on the brink of a civil war, we all can assuredly say that it would have been better if the invasion had never happened. An Iraq plunged into civil war will mean a huge amount of instability in a region already shaking from the Arab Spring and from a looming collision with Iran. Past Administrations, I think, would have been pragmatic, and continued with the devils they knew. Certainly GWB's father did, even as he watched Hussein gassing Kurds, because the alternatives were far worse. It's that alternative we have been witnessing for the last eight years, and likely will continue to witness for years to come.
Any of these acts constitutes acts of war, and would give the US carte blanche to do whatever it liked. If oil production in these countries is interfered with, or the ability to transport them is blocked, China would be harshly impacted and would most certainly withdraw even its now lukewarm support. Such moves on Iran's part would amount to an act of suicide, because US military power would wipe out most of its military capacity, would likely all but destroy the Ayatollahs' regime. You think I'm kidding, just ask the Japanese and the Germans how well they fared under Allied bombing campaigns (culminating in the A bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Iran's infrastructure is already in piss poor shape from three decades of utter mismanagement by the Ayatollahs' regime, and would be trivially easy to completely obliterate by the US airforce and navy. And what exactly could Iran do? Much of its military is relatively poorly equipped, and elements like the Basij would be about as effective as if they all ran into battle naked. You can be damned sure that the US and other Powers know where all its airbases are, and initial strikes would render its air power useless, and after that, it's just a lot of air campaigning.
I can't imagine the Iranian regime surviving more than a few months, and more likely I suspect the actual Iranian Army would probably seize control of the situation. The Basij would prove no resistance to them, and the Revolutionary Guard, while likely well equipped, is insufficient in numbers to actual to ever be a real threat to the Iranian Army.
Could you specify what allies are? Iran has damned few allies when push comes to shove, and if Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, what little shelter China and Russia care to offer will be revoked. Iran is on a tightwire. As long as it doesn't do anything overtly hostile that could damage oil shipments, it gets sort of a pass (for the moment), but the minute it tries to project its force in this way, it loses any alliance really fast.
Indeed, people keep talking about how China somehow owns the US Treasury, when the fact is that the US and the other industrialized nations have the capacity to completely decimate the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is being built on exports, a larger scale version of how Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand built up their economies. China's economy is largely reliant on global appetite for its manufactured goods. If that truly nose dives for any length of time, Chinese holdings of US debt are rather irrelevant, and it would mean a massive drop off in exports, which would hammer the living crap out of the economy.
China is trying to deal with this by growing a middle class sufficient to at least keep things at heartbeat level in the case of a protracted global downturn, but it's years away from this, with a huge proportion of its population still basically living at a rural agrarian level and most certainly nowhere near the level where they can become consumers of the kind needed to keep the factories running. And let's also remember here that countries like the US still have a vast wealth of raw materials, and the decline in industrial output could be reversed if need be, as Lend-Lease demonstrated.
China is an important global power, and certainly it is racing to be the number one economy sometime this century, but I don't think people realize how fragile that growth is, and how utterly dependent China is on foreign markets to keep the ball rolling.
Yup, China will no more stand for the Strait of Hormuz being closed off than the US. The chief difference is that China doesn't have a navy sufficient to project its force, so it will happily let the US do the heavy lifting if Iran attempts a blockade.
It's not about things going bad between your trading partners, it's about your trade, your national lifeblood, being damaged by foreign conflicts. The US didn't become a wealthy powerful nation because it stayed home, it did so because it pursued foreign markets. Any state, particularly one so reliant on commerce, who just lets things happen while it remains theoretically neutral is going to become completely dependent on foreign powers (as the Swiss are, they have neither the population nor the economic base sufficient to support a mass military, and thus, as the saying goes, rely on the kindness of strangers).
The US cannot afford to stay out of the Strait of Hormuz. It cannot afford to allow one of the major oil transport routes to be cut off by Iran. Neither, for that matter, can anyone else. Oil is an international commodity, whether any of us like it or not, and as I said, no matter how isolationist any Administration is, those commerce choke points (like, for instance, the Suez or Panama Canals) must remain open or the national interest is severely compromised.
I agree. The Strait is too important to US interests to allow any power, particularly one that is so ill-prepared to actually hold it, seize the Strait of Hormuz. Let's remember here that the US was largely isolationist in WWI right up until the point that the Germans refused to stop indiscriminate submarine attacks on trans-Atlantic shipping. Keeping one's nose out of foreign conflicts is only really possible where one has no dog in the race. The US since it's very foundation been a mercantile power, and whether it is the Royal Navy impressing American seaman, Barbary pirates raiding US merchant ships, or the Ayatollahs of Iran, US foreign policy has consistently boiled down to "don't fuck with our shipping."
Do you think even an isolationist Administration would let a second-rate power basically put a choke hold on the Strait of Hormuz? One can well imagine just about any President ordering ships into the area to assure safe conduct of merchant traffic.
Iran is the one that started this round, a lot of bluster because of sanctions. Honestly, I suspect there's already more than enough assets in and around the Persian Gulf to wallop Iran very hard indeed
I tend to be of two minds about the the second Gulf War. On the one hand, it's hard to justify in any legal sense, and the contortions the Bush Administration had to go through to justify it, including what amounted to deliberately misinterpreted intelligence data, undermined it early on. At the same time, I can't imagine anyone feeling bad that Hussein was taken out. The chief criticism I have of the Bush Administration isn't the invasion of Iraq, but rather that it was botched. There should have been far more troops sent in. In the grand scale of things, it's relatively easy for a Great Power to knock out a smaller country's government. Building a new government, however, requires the forces necessary to project the victor's will. There has to be substantial subjugation; as was the case of Germany and Japan after WWII. In both cases, the victors literally had the option of massive forces to stamp out any attempted uprising, not to mention being able to function as a government until such time as the civil government apparatus could be restored.
In Iraq, enough troops were sent in to smash Hussein's regime, but not enough were sent in to either stamp out an insurgency, or to serve in a sufficient capacity as a government (including, very importantly, serving as a proper police force). There weren't enough technical experts brought in to restore basic services in a timely manner, so that after the initial goodwill of the fall of Hussein, people found themselves in even worse shape than they had been before the invasion, which rapidly expended any goodwill that the US might have had. It was an incompetent invasion by what I would consider to be politically-masterful morons; quite capable of bamboozling Congress and the American people, at using all the techniques of media manipulation, but when push came to shove, being utterly and completely out of their depth in actually managing a proper occupation of a foreign state.
I don't think Bush, Cheney and their neo-con advisors should be taken out back and shot because they invaded Iraq, I think they should be taken out back and shot because they are profoundly stupid men. If you're going to invade and occupy, then bloody well do it, push the assets through to make it work, otherwise stay at home. Any one of these idiots could have opened up a history book and seen how it's been done successfully, and yet they were fools to a man.
If Iran blockades the Strait, political will won't be a problem. No matter what you think of war and peace, globalism and economics, the reality is that a blockade of one of the most important waterways on the planet will most assuredly bring a firestorm to Iran, one that that country could not hope to weather.
That is an entirely different kind of war. You can have overwhelming forces, and yet a guerrilla-style war will still leave a major power floundering. It happened to Napoleon in Spain, and aspects of the Vietnam War heavily resembled similar tactics. At the same time, you can kill an insurgency, The Brits did it in Malaysia, though it took years to do it.
The Strait of Hormuz is of key global economic importance. If Iran attempts a blockade there will be a war, and a very short one. Iran is very good at bluster, but all the Basij in the world won't mean a bloody thing if the US turns its military assets towards liberating the Strait. I wouldn't assume this would be a war of occupation, like Iraq, but more along the lines of a "welcome to the Stone Age assholes." And you know what, because the Strait is so important, at least the other Western powers are not going to make a lot of noise. Maybe China and Russia will get cranky, but that's about it. A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz will immediately separate Iran from its few remaining friends.
Which is why I don't think it will happen. Blockading a major international waterway is a short route to Iran being pummeled badly. They cannot win. They could, I suppose, cause considerable damage to, say, Israel, but doing that would almost certainly give the US and its allies carte blanche to do whatever they liked.
It depends. I have an old provider-locked LG Keybo which only allows direct installs from their own website. Trivially easy to hack with Bitpim, of course, and I can just copy .jar files to the internal file system and it's menu picks them up right away. I dispensed with the shitty Openwave browser and put on Opera Mini, as well as the Albrite reader which does a nice job with epub books, and it works great. Unfortunately the keyboard is showing wear-and-tear and I'll have to upgrade to an iPhone or Android, but I have to say that with a little hacking my old critter is a great little phone.
Yes, I'm sure foreign navies could sink US naval assets, but the overall US military capacity is sufficiently advanced that it would simply be an example of winning a battle and losing the war.
If Iran did sink or heavily damage some US ships, it would suck, but the US has the military capacity to devastate Iran, to wipe out much of its military capacity. Iran does not have the naval or support capacity to hold the strait.
I get what you're saying, but the only time the Tolkien Estate sues is when someone tries to write some new material within Tolkien's mythos, and even Tolkien, in his later years refused permission to derivative works. If the Estate truly did try to sue everyone who wrote about elves or dwarves, a fairly big chunk of fantasy written in the last half century would be eradicated.
Not that I'm defending the Tolkien Estate, but they're using the laws that the politicians have put in place. If copyright was what it had been half a century ago, the Estate could do nothing if some guy decided to write a sequel to the Lord of the Rings.
All that counts is whether you have the legal clout to stare down the other guy. It has nothing to do with what is right or what is strictly legal. It's pure brinkmanship. What counts in almost every case is how deep your pockets are, frivolousness or abusiveness of lawsuits is only meaningful in the size of the check you can write to your lawer. Sad sometimes when the IP game detrimentally affects the most vulnerable people in society, but this is America, the land where the lawyer laws you!
Sounds better than the Cthulic Oath...
Oh give me a break. Having a journalist deliberately distorting a report to sell newspapers or banner ads or whatever isn't defensible.
I'm sorry, I have patented the process of creating new posts, and you'll have to pay me for each one you make. I'm a reasonable man, unlike those copyright goons, and I'll only charge $0.73.
No one expects journalism to give us complete technical breakdowns, but science journalism has a nasty history of not just skimming over important details, but also of out-and-out sensationalism. Take your average report on some hominid fossil discovery, which by the time it gets through the editorial department has a headline "Map Of Human Evolution Redrawn!"
They're actually saying that the poor performance of the Hollywood version of Dragon Tattoo is due to the fact that fans already saw the Swedish version, and feel no particular need to watch it again.
I felt much the same way about Nikita. The original French version is a fantastic film, and the Hollywood remake, while well done, was really quite superfluous.
I'd wager Hawking doesn't say "God did it."