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salon.com The neocons’ big Iran lie
The right-wing hawks who thought Iraq would be a cakewalk think it'd be easy to attack Iran. Real soldiers say no.
By Matt Duss
In testimony to the Senate Armed Services committee in April 2010, then-Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright said that strikes would, at best, only delay the Iranian nuclear program for a few years, while at the same time solidifying Iranian domestic support for the regime and removing any hesitancy that may have existed over the necessity of obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Asked by Sen. Jack Reed whether the only way to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear capability was “to physically occupy their country and disestablish their nuclear facilities,” Cartwright answered: “Absent some other unknown calculus that would go on, that’s a fair conclusion.”
Cartwright’s comments echoed those of retired Gen. Anthony Zinni from a speech at the New America Foundation in September 2009. Zinni said that he liked to respond to advocates of strikes on Iran with “And then what?”
After you’ve dropped those bombs on those hardened facilities, what happens next? What happens if they decide, in their hardened shelters with their mobile missiles, to start launching those? What happens if they launch them into U.S. bases on the other side of the Gulf? What happens if they launch into Israel, or somewhere else? Into a Saudi oil field? Into Ras Laffan, with all the natural gas? What happens if they now flush their fast patrol boats, their cruise missiles, the strait full of mines, and they sink a tanker, an oil tanker? And of course the economy of the world goes absolutely nuts. What happens if they activate sleeper cells? The MOIS, the intelligence service; what happens if there’s another preemptive attack by the West, the U.S. and Israel, they fire up the streets, and now we’ve got problems. Just tell me how to deal with all that, OK?
“Because, eventually, if you follow this all the way down, eventually I’m putting boots on the ground somewhere,” Zinni concluded. “And as I tell my friends, if you liked Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.”
link to full article:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/the_neocons_big_iran_lie/singleton/
