Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mack4289]

From your article, Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee:

"Among the (partially known) Pentagon's new plans, the two most interesting projects are the "Global Strike" program and the "Rods from God" program."

Do you think "Rods from God" is gay porn or straight porn?

"One of the main reasons, these sources say, is that the Pentagon itself - after spending more than US$100 billion - has finally admitted its failure to create an infallible earth-based, anti-missile system to protect American soil from ballistic strikes."

So we spent 100 billion on a technology that didn't deliver what it promised. What makes you think this project will be any different?

The other big problem I have with this is that I don't think, for all their blustering, Iran wants a nuclear weapon so they can fire it at a country. They want one for the same reason everyone else does- to have leverage over any country that has militaristic designs on them.

By building the weapon, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you didn't have enemies before you started building it, you'll definitely attract them when you start construction. Then an unpopular president like Ahmadinejad can use the threats of other countries to rally his country around him and his nuclear ambitions. In the short term, it's brilliant political strategy. In the long term, it'll leave his country bankrupt and dilapidated.

Another problem with undertaking a Star Wars like system is that it shows either a lack of understanding or a willfull ignorance of the fact that these sorts of weapons systems are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Countries know that fighting the US in a conventional war is absurd. So they fight the way they are in Afghanistan and Iraq, the way they did in Vietnam. Developing ways of combating that kind of warfare should be our primary focus, not developing technologies whose effectiveness will be more fantasy than reality.

Finally, I will say I prefer Israel as the main power in the Middle East and not because they're from my "tribe". Israel is the closest thing (by far) to an open democracy in the Middle East. Their press ripped apart Olmert for the way the Lebanese war was handled. Can you imagine the press of any other country in the Middle East doing the same to its leaders? What kind of system would you rather live under, an Iranian system or an Israeli system?

[dmbfan]

[yawarakaijin]

I tell you, that "they just have to give up their war" has to be one of the most annoying mantras on Dave's. Can you please, please, please just give up saying that they just need to give up their war. Yeah, sure the world would be nice if everyone just bent over backwards and let us ram them from behind, but it's a ridiculous premise. Wars aren't fought by rational, dispassionate people. Telling people to just give up is equally as ridiculous.

[mack4289]

I think we should all be skeptical of what we hear from the US government regarding Iran, considering how we were mislead into going into Iraq.

But, for argument's sake, let's say everything they're saying about Iran is true. How can we invade them and occupy them? Is there any way to do this that even gives us a 50/50 chance of making Iran better off than they were before we invaded? We've already got troops fighting two other wars that are far from being won and whose popularity is decreasing steadily (or in the case of Afghanistan, our indifference to it is increasing steadily). Am I the only one who thinks, regardless of whether you can justify invasion, that invasion is completely impractical?

[koon_taung_daeng]

not invasion just bombing them to let them no not to *beep* around, is that practical at all? what would the pretext be for giving them a good bombing.

and also i don't think Israel wants to control the whole middle east they just want stability in their own country

[mack4289]

Bombing them to take out their nuclear facilities, right?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,149657,00.html

"Ali Akbar Salehi, a nuclear affairs adviser to the foreign minister, said U.S. and Israeli threats forced Iran to take precautions to protect its technology, including the string of centrifuges used to enrich uranium � a process that can produce fuel for nuclear reactors that generate electricity but also make material suitable for atomic warheads.

"To protect the safety of equipment against possible danger of aerial attack, a major part of the plant has been constructed underground, especially where thousands of centrifuges need to be located," Salehi told The Associated Press."

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-strikes-doubt.htm

[i]"One major uncertainty concerning the probability of disarming preventive strike against Iran's nuclear infrastructure is the question of American and Israeli assessments of their confidence in their assessments of the completeness of their understanding of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. It will be recalled that when the US contemplated striking China's nuclear infrastructure in mid-1964, prior to China's first nuclear test, their were doubts about the completeness of US intelligence. In fact, the US was surprised when China detonated a uranium bomb, since the US had overestimated the progress of China's plutonium program, and seriously underestimated the progress of China's uranium enrichment program.

.... Elements of these facilities have been hardened against attack, notably the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, which has been buried under a thick layer of earth. All of these facilities are heavily defended by anti-aircraft missiles and guns.

One cannot exclude the possibility, however, that some or all of the visible nuclear weapons complex is simply a decoy, designed to draw attention. It is possible that Iran, like North Korea and unlike Pakistan, has buried nuclear weapons production capabilities that have escaped detection, and would continue in operation even if the visible facilities were destroyed. There are persistent rumors of such hidden facilities, but little in the way of circumstantial evidence to give credence to these rumors.

... Iran may have understood very clearly from the outset that its above ground facilities would be detected not too long after construction began. Indeed, the uranium conversion facility at Esfahan is at a site that was selected for such a capacity at the outset of the Shah's nuclear program in the 1970s, a fact that must have rendered this piece of real estate a suspect site long before actual construction began. The construction activity at Natanz and Arak would be visible even in 10-meter resolution wide-area imagery, so there could have been no realistic hope that these facilities would escape notice by the obscurity of their location. Although it is possible that the Iranians completely miscalculated the detective powers of the US and Israel, this does not seem plausible. Thus one must assume that Iran foresaw the crisis that would arise when their plans became clear, and planned accordingly.

..... A September 2004 analysis by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center concluded that, "As for eliminating Iran's nuclear capabilities militarily, the U.S. and Israel lack sufficient targeting intelligence to do this. In fact, Iran has long had considerable success in concealing its nuclear activities from U.S. intelligence analysts and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors (the latter recently warned against assuming the agency could find all of Iran's illicit uranium enrichment activities). As it is, Iran could have already hidden all it needs to reconstitute a bomb program assuming its known declared nuclear plants are hit."

But the preponderance of evidence and reasoning leads to the assumption that there is no underground nuclear infrastructure, and that the above ground infrastructure constitutes Iran's nuclear weapons program."[/i]

I don't know about you, but I don't want to put anyone's life at risk for a mission whose effectiveness sounds so uncertain.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[The_Conservative]

[yawarakaijin]

[mack4289]

Joo Rip Gwa Hee

"Actually the US has made lots of progress with missile defense.

First the US has been able to hit a bullet with a bullet only in a test but just a few years ago Putin himself said it could never be done."


Source?

[contrarian]

What is am going to suggest will not be popular:

If the Americans use a nice simple nuclear bunker buster in the hardened facilities it would have a two-fold effect.

First, it would take those sites out, if not entirely, at least make them inopeative for uears. These bombs are relatively clean and don't leave a lot of radiation behind. Nor would there be huge loss of cilvilain life.

Second, the shock effect of doing so would be horrriific. It would be an announcement to the entire Islamic/terrorost world to "don't f@ck with us. There is a proce you don't want to pay.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[mack4289]

I don't doubt that the US has amazing military technology. I'm just saying be skeptical about the claims that come from either the Pentagon or defense contract companies. It's their job to get the US government and taxpayers to spend more of our money on their technology. They've got a reason to exaggerate.

Regarding the "hit Iranian nuclear facilities with a bunker buster" argument: which site do you want to hit? According to this article, there are 4 major sites, spread over a large area http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4617398.stm.

While nuclear weapons might scare the Iranian government, how much do you think it will scare the terrorists? Terrorists kill women, children and themselves every day. Why would a nuclear bomb scare them?

Maybe Iran would pull funding and protection for them, but I think we'd all be surprised how little control any government has over terrorist operations.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[mack4289]

I think we've reached a dead-end in this debate. The efficacy of strikes on Iran is highly doubtful, but the fact that the strikes would inspire; not prevent; terrorism is a near certainty.

If Iran withdrew their support from Hezbollah, Hezbollah would find someone else to support it. Even if Nasrallah, the guy who's supposed to be the spokesmen for Hezbollah, said that the group should lay down its arms, the impact of that would be minimal.

It reminds me of a scene in "The Grapes of Wrath", only in reverse. In the book, someone comes to claim the farmer's land and the farmer wants to shoot him. But the repo man explains that the chain of command is too complex for there to be anyone worth shooting (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/steinbeck-john/1939/grapes-wrath/abstracts.htm). With Hezbollah, the chain of command is too short and spread out for there to be any one person or source of funding whose elimination would have much of an impact.