Replies to post #16930 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BondGekko]

To All Can you or anyone here answer the question of why there are only 12,000 troops hunting Bin Laden, I mean if Bush got Bin Laden before the election it would probably seal the deal for him, I can't find any conceivable reason why we don't have at a minimum 50,000 troops there, if it were me I would pour the same resources we have in Iraq there, right on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, I wouldn't leave until Bin Laden and his cronies were dead or in chains

I wouldn't care what Pakistan told me, I would tell them this is what we are doing, if you don't like it too bad

[F6]

macc14 -- except that fighting terrorism is not what it would be for -- we had plenty of people in uniform for doing that until we went into Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 or al Qaeda, and which posed no threat to us or any other country

my view: as dubya and his folks are already making very clear, if dubya stays in we're gonna be going into Iran (and probably Syria and Lebanon too) next -- that's what the draft will be for -- and as bad and expensive (in terms of lives lost and lives ruined by wounds and DU as well as in terms of dollars) of a mess as Iraq has turned out to be, Iran will be far, far worse -- more than twice the land area, much of it very difficult mountainous terrain; about 70 million people instead of about 25 million (about 12 million in Tehran alone), basically all of them Shi'ites, rather than split into 3 competing groups as in Iraq (though by now we've just about united the Sunnis and the Shi'ites in opposition to us in Iraq); 600,000 under arms in a military that is vastly stronger and more capable than was Saddam's (including some real WMDs, which they have the ability to project over the entire region and almost certainly will use if provoked), plus another 400,000 reserves, plus the ability to mobilize millions more; if you think oil at $40-50/barrel is high, how about the impact of $70-100/barrel (or more) on our own and the world economy -- we could even outright lose militarily (Saddam, even with our help including biological and chemical WMDs, even having much better equipment than the Iranians did then, in 8 years was hardly able to ever even get across their shared border, let alone to conquer Iran, in a war that cost at least 2 million dead; the Iranians were very tough, and no doubt would be again) -- our casualties won't be in the hundreds or thousands killed, they'll be in the tens or even hundreds of thousands killed -- and even if we do 'win' we'll be left with another and much larger and tougher guerilla war of an occupation with no easy way out -- and against that backdrop our remaining capacity to deal with other situations elsewhere in the world will continue be stretched at least as thin as it is now even with a draft -- our alliances, already seriously weakened under this administration, would likely collapse completely, leaving us completely alone in the world -- our budget deficits, now running about half a trillion a year, would rocket to something like a trillion a year, which simply would have to lead at some point to a significant drop in the value of the dollar and other significant negative impacts on not only our own economy but also other economies around the world -- and then of course there's the whole issue of what such a scenario would mean for what's left of our civil liberties here at home, under an administration that has been waging open war on our civil liberties here at home from the day it took office . . .