> At 09:29 AM 4/13/02 -0500 Robert Seeberger wrote: > >The minute Secretary of State Colin Powell departs the region empty-handed, > >Washington's Middle East foes - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah and the > >Palestinians - are set to initiate a coordinated military action with a view > >to reducing the United States to a powerless spectator > > Well, don't they feel silly now! > Why?
xponent rob Well they should feel silly because it was a ludicrous scenario - very odd for Debka, which generally has an excellent record. But actually engaging Israeli forces on the battlefield - instead of trying to murder women and children - means certain defeat for the Arab countries. The Israelis crushed them at least three times since Independence, and all of the factors that made the Israeli military so superior to its Arab counterparts operate _more_ strongly now than they did a generation ago. And the scenario Debka was talking about would, even more amazingly, involve an open challenge to the power of the United States using conventional means. Ones that our military has been specifically designed to defeat. We fought a small war in the 1980s to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. Closing it would immediately drive all of the (currently ambivalent) Gulf Powers into our camp. Within a few months the virtually inevitable result would have been the destruction of the Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian militaries at minimal cost to the United States and moderate cost to Israel, almost certainly followed by a realignment of Middle Eastern nations that would have been entirely favorable to the US and Israel. When I read it, my first thought was that not even those countries could possibly be stupid enough to what was being described. Gautam
