CT GAMER wrote:

purplefood wrote:

CT GAMER wrote:For a country that produced the self-proclaimed legend that is Mattrym you Brits sure are whinning a lot about doing what he repeatedly suggests he would love to do...

Kill everyone who owns a turban? Oh yeah good point.

Jihadin wrote:Didn't germany kind of staged something similiar with Poland before they invaded?

LordofHats wrote:

Ketara wrote:There will be conflict between either the US and Iran, or Israel and Iran within the next year. The signs are all there.

I think the most likely scenario is another Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. So far Iran has been keen to just let the air strikes and cyber attacks slide, so a war will only happen if they decide to change their mind about how they react. If a war does start, I think the chances of US intervention goes up by a lot. Not really sure how Iran would retaliate though. Retaliation airstrikes?

Jihadin wrote:I see walk to the coast fora submarine pick up. Not mention an isreali in a muslim country has the same chance I have if I walk around in Afghanistan...even though we did have a couple idiots try....with a bottle of water and a couple bags of potato chips...in PT uniform....you all know the PT shirt has "ARMY" printed on it right?

Ketara wrote: A is difficult, the Iranian facilities are dug deep, and Israeli lacks the ordnance to demolish them purely by air.

B is even moreso, the Iranians won't have left these facilities undefended against a raid, and successful execution and extraction would be unlikely considering the spread out nature of the sites.

Meaning the most logical route would be for Israel to 'acquire' Bunker Buster bombs from the US, and utterly blitz the sites. Shoot down anything the Iranians put up, and just keep nailing the sites.

Jihadin wrote:I mention on another thread of the hand off of drones from ground control in Afghanistan to the drone operaters in the States. its like 3-4 sec lag on the hand off. Since the transmitter is similiar to our SINGARS the chances of Iran cracking into the Freq is nil.....very very nil. Time, starting freq, and how many freq a second the transmitter jumps is an idea how SINGARS work for those that are not fimiliar with it. Good bet someone did not have a good "Fill" in the states.

LordofHats wrote:
I think that's why they've stepped up cyber attacks, but the tech ability of a lot of countries can be quite surprising. Iran's no China but they're not pushovers. I don't think airstrikes or cyber attacks are going to be as useful as they once were.

I don't even think B is an option. To logistically difficult.

I don't even know if those would be enough. A lot of the sites are way deep. Bombing them is impractical. The amount of ordnance needed would be absurd. I don't think that'll stop Israel from trying per se, but still. Oddly enough, A good nuke might do the job but even Israel in its kneejerk craziest moments I don't think is that crazy.

obsidianaura wrote:I think this is just lies from what i remember of these spy planes.

1 These things are stealth
2 They fly too high to be shot down
3 They have self-destruct systems in place

So all in all i think they're making this up. Has the US checked to see if they're missing one?

I see walk to the coast fora submarine pick up. Not mention an isreali in a muslim country has the same chance I have if I walk around in Afghanistan

Hulksmash wrote:I'd point out that N. Korea gets away with more not just because of it's proximity to China but also because they practically hold S. Korea hostage. Any type of strike on N. Korea would not be fast enough to prevent them from destroying millions with just their ready weaponry.

As for the Iran issue as a whole I suspect that if Iran moves against Israel our chance as the US in becoming involved becomes a certainty.

Regarding the drone I have no problem with drones invading their air space and keeping tabs. We lose one it happens. Not like they don't fall out of the sky on their own anyway....

Imagine, for a moment, that you are an Iranian mullah. Sitting crosslegged on your Persian rug in Tehran, sipping a cup of chai, you glance up at the map of the Middle East on the wall. It is a disturbing image: your country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is surrounded on all sides by virulent enemies and regional rivals, both nuclear and non-nuclear.

On your eastern border, the United States has 100,000 troops serving in Afghanistan. On your western border, the US has been occupying Iraq since 2003 and plans to retain a small force of military contractors and CIA operatives even after its official withdrawal next month. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation, is to the south-east; Turkey, America's Nato ally, to the north-west; Turkmenistan, which has acted as a refuelling base for US military transport planes since 2002, to the north-east. To the south, across the Persian Gulf, you see a cluster of US client states: Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet; Qatar, host to a forward headquarters of US Central Command; Saudi Arabia, whose king has exhorted America to "attack Iran" and "cut off the head of the snake".

Then, of course, less than a thousand miles to the west, there is Israel, your mortal enemy, in possession of over a hundred nuclear warheads and with a history of pre-emptive aggression against its opponents.

The map makes it clear: Iran is, literally, encircled by the United States and its allies.

If that wasn't worrying enough, your country seems to be under (covert) attack. Several nuclear scientists have been mysteriously assassinated and, late last year, a sophisticated computer virus succeeded in shutting down roughly a fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges. Only last weekend, the "pioneer" of the Islamic Republic's missile programme, Major General Hassan Moghaddam, was killed – with 16 others – in a huge explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base 25 miles outside Tehran. You go online to discover western journalists reporting that the Mossad is believed to have been behind the blast.

And then you pause to remind yourself of the fundamental geopolitical lesson that you and your countrymen learned over the last decade: the US and its allies opted for war with non-nuclear Iraq, but diplomacy with nuclear-armed North Korea.

If you were our mullah in Tehran, wouldn't you want Iran to have the bomb – or at the very minimum, "nuclear latency" (that is, the capability and technology to quickly build a nuclear weapon if threatened with attack)?

Let's be clear: there is still no concrete evidence Iran is building a bomb. The latest report from the IAEA, despite its much discussed reference to "possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear programme", also admits that its inspectors continue "to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at [Iran's] nuclear facilities". The leaders of the Islamic Republic – from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – maintain their goal is only to develop a civilian nuclear programme, not atomic bombs.

Nonetheless, wouldn't it be rational for Iran – geographically encircled, politically isolated, feeling threatened – to want its own arsenal of nukes, for defensive and deterrent purposes? The US government's Nuclear Posture Review admits such weapons play an "essential role in deterring potential adversaries" and maintaining "strategic stability" with other nuclear powers. In 2006, the UK's Ministry of Defence claimed our own strategic nuclear deterrent was designed to "deter and prevent nuclear blackmail and acts of aggression against our vital interests that cannot be countered by other means".

Apparently, what is sauce for the Anglo-American goose is not sauce for the Iranian gander. Empathy is in short supply. As leading US nuclear policy analyst George Perkovich has observed: "The US government never has publicly and objectively assessed Iranian leaders' motivations for seeking nuclear weapons and what the US and others could do to remove those motivations." Instead, the Islamic Republic is dismissed as irrational and megalomaniacal.

But it isn't just Iran's leaders who are unwilling to back down on the nuclear issue. On Tuesday, around 1,000 Iranian students formed a human chain around the uranium conversion facility in Isfahan, chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel". Their protest may have been organised by the authorities but even the leaders and members of the opposition Green Movement tend to support Iran's uranium enrichment programme. According to a 2010 University of Maryland survey, 55% of Iranians back their country's pursuit of nuclear power and, remarkably, 38% support the building of a nuclear bomb.

So what is to be done? Sanctions haven't worked and won't work. Iranians refuse to compromise on what they believe to be their "inalienable" right to nuclear power under the Non-proliferation treaty. Military action, as the US defence secretary Leon Panetta admitted last week, could have "unintended consequences", including a backlash against "US forces in the region". The threat of attack will only harden the resolve for a nuclear deterrent; belligerence breeds belligerence.

The simple fact is there is no alternative to diplomacy, no matter how truculent or paranoid the leaders of Iran might seem to western eyes. If a nuclear-armed Iran is to be avoided, US politicians have to dial down their threatening rhetoric and tackle the very real and rational perception, on the streets of Tehran and Isfahan, of America and Israel as military threats to the Islamic Republic. Iranians are fearful, nervous, defensive – and, as the Middle East map shows, perhaps with good reason. As the old adage goes, just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

obsidianaura wrote:I

So all in all i think they're making this up. Has the US checked to see if they're missing one?

LordofHats wrote:Iran's problem is that if it stopped developing nuclear technology Israel and the US and their allies would no longer see Iran as a threat. The idea that Iran needs the weapon to deter aggression is circular logic. They're developing a WMD and everyone is their enemy, so they need a WMD to defend against all these enemies.

LordofHats wrote:Iran's problem is that if it stopped developing nuclear technology Israel and the US and their allies would no longer see Iran as a threat. The idea that Iran needs the weapon to deter aggression is circular logic. They're developing a WMD and everyone is their enemy, so they need a WMD to defend against all these enemies.