Monday, February 12, 2007
Causes Belie
Assume the best possible outcome to the sort of action that the Vice President and his clique appear to be angling for. We attack Iran -- either in crossborder raids or aerial bombing campaigns. The Iranians are duly chastened and stop all assistance, financial and military, to paramilitaries in Iraq. And this accomplishes? For our situation in Iraq, not much. We go from the IEDs of early 2007 back to the old style IEDs of 2006. In other words, for the outside chance of a temporary and marginal degradation of the quality of the IEDs used in Iraq we run all the risks of digging ourselves deeper into the current quagmire getting still more American soldiers killed and further stoking anti-American animus in the region with the likely outcome of solidifying the regime in Tehran for decades to come. And after all that fun is done with we're back to the same situation in Iraq that we can't figure out a way to resolve today.
Actually, the best case scenario probably isn't even as rosy as Josh's considerably pessimistic take. Consider this: even if Iran were to cut off the putative flow of high end IEDs (EFPs), the technology and know-how is already in the hands of the groups that received the assistance prior to Iran's "change of heart."
So the only real hardship for the militant groups in question would be the necessity to build, in-house, the small number of EFPs that they had been previously receiving via import. So we should risk a catastrophe of enormous and far-reaching proportions for all that?
Well there ain't no time to wonder why, Whoopee we're all gonna die!
