Are We Really Going Down This Road Again?

I saw the same article in Time magazine that the rest of the country saw yesterday. But after reading the first paragraph, my the feeling in my gut was one of dread, and a sense of mistakes being made all over again.

Posted Sunday, Sep. 17, 2006
The first message was routine enough: a "Prepare to Deploy" order sent through naval communications channels to a submarine, an Aegis-class cruiser, two minesweepers and two mine hunters. The orders didn't actually command the ships out of port; they just said to be ready to move by Oct. 1. But inside the Navy those messages generated more buzz than usual last week when a second request, from the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), asked for fresh eyes on long-standing U.S. plans to blockade two Iranian oil ports on the Persian Gulf. The CNO had asked for a rundown on how a blockade of those strategic targets might work. When he didn't like the analysis he received, he ordered his troops to work the lash up once again.

What's going on? The two orders offered tantalizing clues.
there are only a few places in the world where minesweepers top the list of US naval requirements. And every sailor, petroleum engineer and hedge-fund manager knows the name of the most important: the Straight of Hormuz, the 20 mile wide bottleneck in the Persian Gulf through which roughly 40% of the world's oil needs to pass each day. Coupled with the CNO's request for a blockade review, and deployment of minesweepers to the west coast of Iran would seem to suggest that a much discussed-but until now largely theoretical-prospect has become real:that the US may be preparing for war with Iran.

Well that's just peachy isn't it?

As unthinkable as it may be for our country to widen the war that we are losing on two fronts, we seem to be heading down that same road to disaster. It's an election year, the war President needs support, there are all sorts of threats that we need to be frightened of, and so here we go again. The same exaggerated intelligence reports, we're back asking the security council for sanctions, and when you think about it, has Iran ever threatened any of it's neighbors? Has Iran threatened the US? Does Iran have a nuclear weapon? The answers to the questions are all no.

So what are we doing?

I hope it's just election year war-mongering, just the Republicans trying to frighten our helpless little country into voting for the Party of War, but what if it's the Bush Administration trying to launch one last battle before the Democrats take hold of the House and Senate, and put a stop to all of this gratuitous killing. They can't seriously be considering opening another front in the war on terror when we are still losing in Afghanistan five years later. If we can't win the conflict against an unorganized bunch of insurgents who don't even have an Air Force, what makes Cheney and Bush think they can take on Iran?

Are they stupid?

The cover story in Time Magazine tell us What War With Iran Would Look Like. I don't think that they got it quite right, because they left out the part where the US economy would come to a standstill without the steady supply of oil needed to fuel our economy. And don't forget, that these same men told us that those lies in the last conflict, that we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq, that the conflict in Iraq would pay for itself, and that we would be done with the war in a matter of months.

We cannot allow our leaders to take us down this same road.

It will be the ruin of us.

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