Know any good lawyers Jeff?

Your blog is being infiltrated by sneaky jackass advertisers. You should round up all the lawyers your read Donklephant and sue the bastards.

“(sanctions) didn’t do crap to stop Saddam Hussein”

Yes, they did. He didn’t have WMDs, remember?

We still did invade iraq (remember?) because sanctions did not work to provoke accountability from the regime. Everyone believed there were still chemical and biological weapons even 10 years after the first of many strategic air strikes. Do you believe Amedinajad would be more forthcoming than Saddam Hussein?

Besides, we would know for sure that Amedinajad would have WMD, since we directly supplied the plutonium already!!

I never said he has openly called for invasion, and honestly, neither has Bush.

I don’t care what you never said about what he said, the point is he didnt say it!

Frankly, when John Kerry says he would use military force if necessary to defend the american people, I don’t believe him; at least not in the scenario we are discussing here. It doesn’t pass the global test. He has to spell it out in plain english and make the guarantee I mentioned above to get me to believe otherwise. When Bush says it is unacceptable that Iran gets a nukeyaler weapon, I’ll take his word for it. He seems to “say what he means and means what he says.”

I don’t doubt Kerry would advocate sanctions after Iran cheats on the deal. Sanctions aren’t good enough. Once you got the fuel, you make the bombs.

Bush has already said he’d consider sanctions too. But if you think a Democrat wouldn’t consider military strikes, then you are sorely mistaken. Just look at Clinton’s record of strategic military strikes, especially in and around Iraq.

(sanctions) didn’t do crap to stop Saddam Hussein

Yes, they did. He didn’t have WMDs, remember?

Find a quote from kerry that said he would advocate invasion, occupation, or regime change as a consequence of breaking the deal and I will take back what I said.

I never said he has openly called for invasion, and honestly, neither has Bush. However, what they’ve both said is that they’ll use any type of force necessary to protect the American people. I read from a statement like that, every option is on the table, including your three.

Protection of the country has unfortunately been turned into a partisan issue, and I wish it hadn’t been. The Republicans have everybody convinced that Kerry would have just handed over nuclear fuel with no restrictions because he got campaign contributions. Are you kidding me? That’s insane, and any reasonable person should see through that obvious partisan hackery.

Wouldn’t an Iranian spigot turn-off accelerate the world towards alternative fuels (a good thing)?

Well sure, but not before it seriously cripples the economies of countless countries.

But I ask you this, do you really think Republicans are going to push for alternative energy sources or call for drilling in ANWR? I haven’t seen any REAL progress on the alternative energy front since Bush paid the completely unworkable hydrogen energy idea lip service in his 2004 SOTU address.

Jeezus, alternative energy sources and finding other ways of making crude should be one of our TOP activities right now, and it simply isn’t. This baffles me.

If they kicked people out, the only other options would be sanctions or strategic military attacks

I don’t doubt Kerry would advocate sanctions after Iran cheats on the deal. Sanctions aren’t good enough. Once you got the fuel, you make the bombs. Sanctions are too little to late, they didn’t do crap to stop Saddam Hussein or North Korea either. We don’t need to punish Iran economically as retribution for cheating, we have to stop them from making the bomb period.

You can’t guarantee you’ve ended the nuclear threat by strategic military strikes either. Look at Iraq; there were strikes in 1991,1993,1994,1998 and all intelligence agencies in the world still believed some wmd was there. We never would have known for sure without invasion/occupation.

Find a quote from kerry that said he would advocate invasion, occupation, or regime change as a consequence of breaking the deal and I will take back what I said.

There is no way that John Kerry would have done that.

Wrong. Kerry specifically said that giving nuclear fuel to Iran was calling their bluff. If they kicked people out, the only other options would be sanctions or strategic military attacks.

But what people don’t realize is that Iran already has a WMD. It’s their oil. And if they shut off the spigot, the cost to the world’s economy could be incredibly severe.

There is no way that John Kerry would have done that. Jack Straw has already said that military options are off the table for Great Britain. We gave fuel to North Korea in the late 70’s for “peaceful purposes” and they built bombs with it. Kim-Jeong-Il is crazy, but he doesnt seem to have the apocalyptic visions that Armageddonajad has, and I don’t hear anything about wiping Seoul off the map.

Am I right DP?

My question to you is, “What other choice do we have?” This way it seems like we’re acting in good faith, and if they begin to resist, we’ll bomb their plants. No matter if the President were a Republican or Democrat, they’d be considering the same options. And that’s blatantly obvious now from Bush adopting Kerry’s strategy.

That “plan� is laughable, farsical, and potentially tragic.

And what is your plan DP?

If I were Iranian, yeah, I’d love nothing more than to be in the secondary market for nuclear waste with…the Russians, international models of nuclear integrity. I’d move to Moscow just for the price of gas. What will the effects on Chechnya be — what arrangments can be worked out, Vlad?

John Kerry greased palms with Daniel Ortega - what does that say about his judgment?

Anyway, if we can make this happen, the important thing is to keep Russia and Iran at arm’s length. With Putin and his cronies running the show in Russia, we can’t trust them farther than we can spit. If Iraq taught us anything, it’s that Russia is in this for their own self interest. So everything has to go through the IAEA, who needs to account for all the fuel, and all the waste.

Iraq’s shia are playing a dangerous cross-border game and the US is going to support it. The end result, if it works, will be a declaration of heresy from Najaf/Karbala and the fall of the Iranian regime as it’s remaining support, religious conservatives, breaks apart.

Religious fights aren’t fought the same way that secular ones are. The bombs can be one phrase in a 50 page document. Take Pope Benedict’s 1st encyclical. It’s ostensibly about love and that is, in fact, its real object. But then we have this:

In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant.

In other words, pay attention muslims! Pay attention haters of all stripes. God is love, not hate, and when somebody says that you have a duty to hate someone, that person is not from God.

No doubt, what will set off the Iran/Iraq religious strife is going to sound just as innocuous outside of Shia Islam as an agnostic may perceive the Papal statement above. Hopefully, it will have deadly consequences for Khomeinism and the current regime in Iran.

Getting back to the Kerry/Bush thing, I was absolutely convinced that we were sending troops into Iraq long before we declared hostilities to have resumed in order to prepare the battle space. I don’t think a President Gore would have done that. I don’t think that President Kerry would have instituted a hidden campaign against Iran or would push the wedge issue of Shia heresy as a solution for the problem of Iran. Later events showed that we had, in fact, sent troops in to prepare the battlefield in Iraq in advance of hostilities. Only time will tell if the hidden campaign that I (and probably many on the right) assume is going on is also a reality or just wishful thinking.

Could the west do without their oil?

Absolutely not. Even though we don’t buy from Iran, those countries who do would have to look elsewhere for their oil. The consequences would be disastorous. That’s why you’re seeing Bush make these concessions. Iran has us between an oil derrick and a hard place.

We in the US would have to cut consumption to make it work, not an easy sell.

After 9/11 we were asked to give NOTHING up. In fact, we were asked to buy more so our economy would bounce back. America doesn’t know how to cut consumption anymore. Our grandparents knew, but we’re so comfortable anymore, that we simply can’t fathom it.

And besides, it would political suicide for anybody who suggested it. Unfortunate because I know if somebody laid out a plan for frugal consumption, I’d certainly like to see it and I’m sure many others would too.

And as far as channeling anybody, well, I think that’s unfair. The right-wing spreads memes just like the left. Come on…

But yes, one does wonder about what the reaction in the right-wing blogosphere will be, and that’s what we’ll see in the days to come I’m sure. This post was a challenge to that previous thinking, and I’m curious to see what happens.

But here’s the thing, both you and I can surmise from past knowledge that Bush doesn’t make decisions without first getting A LOT of advice. This gambit had to come from within, and so that’s a major shift in his foreign policy stance. Our position on Iran is fast becoming akin to our position on North Korea. At least Kerry explained his position as “calling Iran’s bluff.”

And yes, what to do? Before Iran talked about the oil thing, I was thinking, “Okay, well maybe strategic bombings would work,” but obviously that’s not the case now. Bush got some new intel and formulated from there. And I can’t help but think that many on the right wing are going to honestly change their tune on this one. Because at the end of the day, Russia doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons either because they know what they’ll do with them. That would completely screw Russia if Iran tried to destroy Israel because Israel would destory Iran and there goes all that oil.

Always go back to the oil Cal. We just need to fend off Iran for the next 20 years or so…until we develop some serious gas saving tech, and then we can cut their nuclear spigot off.

To close, I guess thinking that they’ll reject it is a clever ploy. But we’ll never truly know if that his intention, so I’d err on the side of him actually meaning what he says. After all, I’m not one of those liberals who thinks Bush lies every time he opens his mouth. ;-)

On the other hand, a safe policy for any candidate to propose, or any U.S. president to endorse when another nation proposes it, because the Iranian hard-liners won’t be letting any outsiders handle the keys to their nuclear plants, which would be an intolerable affront and defeat the whole purpose of the bid to be an Islamic nuclear power. It only looks like a policy. It’s just a tactic.