If you have a halfway long memory, you have to be thinking "Uh-oh" about now. From CBSNews.com:The Pentagon is planning to bolster its presence in the Persian Gulf as a warning to Iran's continuously defiant government, CBS News reports.
CBS News national security correspondent David Martin says the U.S. military build-up, which would include adding a second aircraft carrier to the one already in the Gulf, is being proposed as a response to what U.S. officials view as an increasingly provocative Iranian leadership.
Recent Iranian naval exercises, support for Shiite militias in Iraq, and Tehran's allegedly peaceful nuclear enrichment program — which U.S. intelligence believes is designed to produce a bomb — have all lead to the planned changes, Martin reports.
Military officers say the build-up would take place after the first of the year, not with the aim of actually attacking Iran, but strictly as a deterent.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be nuts, but I suspect he may be smarter than the entire Bush Administration, and he has the home-field advantage. And his naval commanders surely have thought of this and this (which is where the halfway long memory part comes in).
See, in 2002 war games representing an invasion of Iraq -- right next door to Iran and with a tiny Persian Gulf coastline (unlike Iran's long Gulf coastline) -- a retired Marine general wiped out an entire American armada:
In the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics, the wily 64-year-old Vietnam veteran sank most of the US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt. What happened next will be familiar to anyone who ever played soldiers in the playground. Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this cheating that he refused to play any more. Instead, he sat on the sidelines making abrasive remarks until the three-week war game - grandiosely entitled Millennium Challenge - staggered to a star-spangled conclusion on August 15, with a US "victory".
If the Pentagon thought it could keep its mishap quiet, it underestimated Van Riper. A classic marine - straight-talking and fearless, with a purple heart from Vietnam to prove it - his retirement means he no longer has to put up with the bureaucratic niceties of the defence department. So he blew the whistle.
As at Pearl Harbor, you don't get "do overs" in real life when your fleet ends up on the bottom of the deep blue sea. If the Iranians have enough explosive-packed aerial drones, rocket-powered torpedoes and speedboats with suicide jockeys at the helm, all of Rome's jet fighters and all of Rome's high-tech defense systems won't be able to save George W. Bush, head in hands, from crying "He sank my battleship! And my carriers! And my cruisers . . . ."
King George's know-nothing hubris has just about broken our Army and Marines in the Iraqi desert. Is he aiming to finish the job (and maybe cripple the Navy, too) in Iran?
1 comment:
Mighty Favog,
Linked here from Mark Shea.
Lets not forget who did win the first portion of the conflict in Iraq. As I recall, Mr. Hussein is still in jail with a death sentence over his head. The problem with using wargames played in our armed forces to judge what another country "will" do is that it assumes they have the advantage of our military's training and won't predjuice their own armed forces options with their own notions of superiority. Certainly any attack on Iran could be fraught with dangers, that doesnt mean that they WILL happen.
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