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Originally Posted by damian2001
I expect that the US will encourage the reformists in Iran, and there are a lot of them, to start something.
Then the US will have an excuse, going in to help others fighting for democracy.
They are sending a message "go for it, we will watch your backs"
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It might be a harder sell even to a dumbed down American public, because Iran is a partial democracy and slowly moving closer to what we would recognize as a real democracy. And I'm sure that many people are ready to remind the rest that the last time the US interfered directly in Iranian affairs was to support the Shah: a rather unpleasant gentleman complete with CIA-trained secret police.
Still, I imagine with a little effort, the government could do a PR job on the US public. But that ignores the reality that Iraq has bogged down 150,000 troops and put a huge strain on our military and our economy. We are going to be tied up there for at least 5 years and possibly longer if we are not thrown out and compared to Iran, Iraq was a very soft target. I have no doubt the White House and others -
http://www.theorator.com/bills108/s1082.html - would like to act against Iran, but I seriously doubt it is feasible in the near future.
Except perhaps out of desperation. We don't know yet how much control we can retain in Iraq nor for how long. The tolerance of our own public to the cost of being there is also unknown, but obviously it will continue to decline and past a certain point there will be zero support for similar activities elsewhere in the region. Yet if we don't do something, Iraq and Iran will grow close, bringing a stability to the region that it hasn't known since the First World War, and meanwhile the warning signs are up for the regimes in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. We face the strong possibility that within 10 years the four biggest oil producing countries will all be governed by virulently anti-american regimes.
But what to do that will actually work for us? We need the oil so we cannot flatten the whole region and even the most enthusiastic flag waver surely doesn't imagine we can occupy the whole Middle East. Our activities over the last 80 years have all but guaranteed at least 20 years of mending fences, even if there were any sign (which there is not) that we intended to go that route. I think I hear the sound of chickens coming home to roost and as we try to divert them, the next 10 years should be interesting to say the least.