“An attack on Iran would be bad news, but in the long run a military that does not obey the civilian, elected leadership would be far worse.”

No one is talking about our military taking over the government and running the country, although that has not always gone bad, if you look at Turkey since 1983. All that has to be done is risk the end of your career for the sake of your country instead of risking the lives of your men and women many-fold. Any chairman of the JCS would have a powerful platform that the M$M would eagerly cover by simply stepping down and speaking out before not after the start of such an ignominious conflict.

He would immediately become an American icon and someone that the weak kneed in congress could cling to and politically benefit from even with AIPAC howling and tossing money in the air.

"We are not going to attack Iraq, they pose no real threat to us at least for many years, if ever." My stupid thoughts in 2002. I want to believe you are right and I am wrong again. please tell me how to stop them so you will be right. We will have a lot more to worry about than alternate sources of energy, if you are wrong.

Let me clarify because I never believed that Iraq was ever a real threat to us. I speculated that in many years they might become one, but then added, if ever. In 2002, after having read all the inspection team news reports and WMD speculation, I did succumb to the possibility because of all the threat noise that there may develop some kind of possible future threat. Then when I thought of all the awful ramifications of an invasion, I thought the chance of a threat was minimal at best.

As a member of the military, you spend so much effort on possible threats that I guess you never dismiss possibilities. The grave mistake that most of my military peers make is to think with a western, American mindset and spend little time studying the culture and mindset of a potential enemy. And even worse, thinking that you can always succeed because you have superior physical force and techniques and that any complex problem surely has a simple answer. The thirst to gitter dun can overwhelm thinking enough about the true costs.

While the neocons did invade for oil and military basing, and the Saudis encouraged Iraq basing so that we would get our presence out of their country, the reasons for the invasion go well beyond that. Israel and messianic goals are just two of the other reasons. Bush is also not spewing rhetoric when he talks about spreading freedom so he can become one of histories greatest figures. There are a lot of masters of misdirection, but junior is not one of them except when he is a puppet, which is often.

I appreciate your comments about my service. I always believed that I was defending our nation so that anyone disagreeing with me had the right to do so including the times like during Vietnam when I had blood poured on my files by a priest. There are far too many in our government and military today, who are so sure they are right that they blind themselves to how much they are harming our country and its ideals. The people on this thread do a great job of reminding us about the costs and I hope some of them doing planning on Iran would study them instead of how to gitter dun.

“That way if the war is in fact not necessary (which anyone without access to the classified sources like you or I will find it hard to judge definitively),”

At the war protest last night, I met a fellow retired Air Force officer and in the course of our discussion we had total agreement about our disdain for info from intell types. His perspective was that of a pilot and mine a public affairs officer. There has been all kinds of evidence before and during this Iraq debacle that intell has often been far from helpful.

In the early days of our new unified command, I set up an early morning briefing for our US Central Command CINC that reviewed Middle East media because I knew that their very controlled media were often used by governments to shape developments. Soon our CINC was yelling at the intell general and asking why his intell was so wrong and screwed up. Then intell briefers started coming to me well before they pre-briefed their general. Intell and operations types often get so excited about their special classified info that they can lose sight of the bigger picture and the real value of their sources.

It’s clear to me that an awful lot of bloggers, especially on this thread, knew a lot more about what was and wasn’t happening in Iraq than the intell guys or at least those who were so eager to please Cheney and Rumsfeld.