LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY catvincent)

I'm studying with great attention John Robb's book 'Brave New War' - his detailed but readable discussion of the nature of the kind of decentralised guerrilla forces that with modern tech and comms are capable of taking on a military state and winning. Depressing and scary and I think essential in understanding the modern world and our immediate future.

He's a smart guy, experienced in strategic thought (ex planner of counterterror ops for SEAL) and he's done his research. Even if I can't tempt you to read the book, I do urge you to check out his blog and do the necessary back-reading to grok the concepts he uses. He understands the nature of modern warfare in a way very few in the US military do, and the political wing of the Dominion don't at all.

For example, he points out the very sensible reason an attack on Iran is a really bad idea - it'd be a major blow to international trade with massive knock-on effects to the global economy.

Unfortunately...

David Brin reports on an article , ”Losing Iraq, Nuking Iran” from Paul Craig Roberts. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. In short, a man deep in old-school Republican Conservatism. Here's what Roberts says:

“The prospect of nuking Iran doesn't seem to disturb the three frontrunners for the Republican nomination, who agreed in their June 5 debate that the US might use nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities.”

' “The war in Iraq is lost. This fact is widely recognized by American military officers and has been recently expressed forcefully by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of US forces in Iraq during the first year of the attempted occupation. Winning is no longer an option. Our best hope, Gen. Sanchez says, is "to stave off defeat," and that requires more intelligence and leadership than Gen. Sanchez sees in the entirety of our national political leadership: "I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time."

“More evidence that the war is lost arrived June 4 with headlines reporting: "U.S.-led soldiers control only about a third of Baghdad, the military said on Monday." After five years of war the US controls one-third of one city and nothing else.”

Moreover: “A year ago Colin Powell said that the US Army is "about broken." Col. Andy Bacevich, America's foremost writer on military affairs, documents in the current issue of The American Conservative that Bush's insane war has depleted and exhausted the US Army and Marine Corps:"Only a third of the regular Army's brigades qualify as combat-ready. In the reserve components, none meet that standard. When the last of the units reaches Baghdad as part of the president's strategy of escalation, the US will be left without a ready-to-deploy land force reserve." '

And then the bombshell, as it were:

' “Neocons have convinced themselves that nuking Iran will show the Muslim world that Muslims have no alternative to submitting to the will of the US government. Insurgency and terrorism cannot prevail against nuclear weapons.Many US military officers are horrified at what they think would be the worst ever orchestrated war crime.

' “There are reports of threatened resignations. But Dick Cheney is resolute. He tells Bush that the plan will save him from the ignominy of losing the war and restore his popularity as the president who saved Americans from Iranian nuclear weapons. With the captive American media providing propaganda cover, the neoconservatives believe that their plan can pull their chestnuts out of the fire and rescue them from the failure that their delusion has wrought.” '

That - plus reading Robb - is plenty scary. Then Brin finishes off the piece with his own (he admits rather madcap, but not actually impossible) idea that the situation in the White House and Pentagon could be best described by a 'Manchurian Candidate' model...

So - Iran nuked for basically the same face-saving gain that led Thatcher to the Falklands. But with oil. Maybe not by stupididy, but plan.

And, if Robb is right (and he's been spot-on so far, more than anyone else in the field) the Global Guerrillas who survive will just spread their memes and continue winning.

They're an enemy the US Dominion fear greatly - one they can't fight directly, where every indirect action against them and their support structure (or as we like to call them,' non-combatants') risks massive blowback from media exposure. These open-source terrorists (another term Robb coined) are also the perfect enemy for propaganda, excusing even more draconian loss of liberties... and so the wheel turns.

(X-posted to my blog)

EDIT - full article 'Losing Iraq, Nuking Iran' is here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts06072007.html