Why America Won't Invade Iran - A Lesson from the Iran-Iraq War
February 26, 2007
Last year the History Channel ran a show that detailed Saddam's rise to power. It spent a good deal of time on the long war he initiated with Iran. Looking like a World War I documentary that had been colorized, it had trench warfare, gas warfare, hordes of people running into hails of bullets, barbed wired fences, etc. What struck me is a tactic of the Iranian leadership when faced with the problem of a shortage of manpower and rifles: they took school kids, elementary school age, armed them each with nothing more than a copy of the Koran, and sent them running on foot in mass waves towards the Iraqi lines, where those in front were decimated by gunfire and those in the next rows would pick up the rifles of the fallen and continue the onslaught. Would the American people support such a slaughter of innocent unarmed children? Of course not. That's why, if push does come to shove, there will be precision aerial bombing of strategic sites, but no invasion. Such an invasion would be un-winnable on every level imagineable.
Farhad Abdolian, your perspective is welcome here. I don't agree with your all of your positions though. We can find common ground in opposing war between the U.S. and Iran. We can also agree that the vast majority of American citizens sitting at home can have no possible grasp of the horrors of war, whether 100 people are involved or a million; the only thing that comes close is when someone loses a loved one in a distant war zone; even then, however, they cannot know what is endured and seen on a daily basis in war by the soldiers of both sides and the everyday citizens in the land where it is fought.
Where I must disagree is the assertion that Americans don't care for things other than their own pocket or American lives. Many of our soldiers who voluntarily enlist for duty do so out of patriotism AND out of the American ideal of fighting for freedom for those who can't fight for themselves. So although our government acts almost exclusively on profit motive and our own national security interests, the actual people of America still believe in ideals and principles and human rights for all, and many of them risk their lives or contribute money in pursuit of those aims. Which is why the media censors the terrible imagery of innocents in foreign countries being destroyed accidentally by our military operations: if the citizens of America were to actually see that, they would loudly demand another way. We do care, whether we are able to do anything about it or not.
Posted by: worth | October 05, 2007 at 09:26 AM