Letters to the Editor
latias_ca
Published Letters: 2
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What Iran can do to the US (and the world) if attacked
[Read the article: The Iran hawks]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The US would make a terrible mistake in attacking Iran. This is the opinion of Gwynne Dyer, a respected military analyst and an internationally syndicated columnist on foreign affairs. He lives in London. Here's what he says in a recent interview about the consequences of such an attack:
“You [the US] can’t invade Iran on the ground, obviously. That’s not possible, because you don’t have the resources. You can bomb the place until you're blue in the face but you have nothing to do as an encore. Because you are not going to invade on the ground, and the Iranians have several options, all of which are far more impressive than what you’re doing.
“All they have to do is stop exporting their own oil. That’s 3.5 million barrels a day, and oil just hit $80. That’s your starting point. You could get to $140 per barrel just by pulling that off. Iran also has its coastline on the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. They have got, from the Russians, these supersonic sea-skimming missiles, ship killers. They only take three or four man crews and they mount on the back of a truck. The U.S. Air Force has no more a prospect of getting all of those than the Israelis did of getting all the Hezbollah positions. And all you have to do is sink one tanker a day. They are big targets, hard to miss, half a mile long. And in five days the shipping insurance rates for putting a ship into the Gulf is more than the ship’s worth. No ship owner will send ships in there. The whole flow of Gulf oil stops, that’s 20 percent of global supply. So we’ve got $250 per barrel oil, gas rationing, economic crisis, and there’s nothing you can do about it. So you don’t really want to do this thing.
“What the fantasists in the White House tell themselves, and they’ve been telling themselves this for years, is the same thing they told themselves about Iraq. ‘All we have to do is attack this regime. In the case of Iran we don’t even have to invade. We just bomb them, demonstrate their impotence, and the Iranian people will, in righteous wrath, rise up, overthrow them and, you know, adopt our values.’
“This is part of the doctrine they believe. They believe it because they believe they brought the Soviet Union down with the example of American virtue. They believe that it could have worked in Iraq, but that there were just some errors in application. And they believe they can do it now in Iran.”
Enough said, I think.
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Medical bills and bankruptcy
[Read the article: My big, fat, unpaid credit card bill]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Just a note on the evils of socialized medical care (Canada's, specifically)... US data is from a 2007 article in the NYT...
50 percent of American personal bankruptcies are a result of being unable to pay medical bills.
75 percent of those US medical-bill bankruptcies were suffered by people who had medical insurance but were under-insured.
Doing the math... (50% x 75%) = 37.5 percent of all American bankruptcies are suffered by people who HAVE medical insurance.
In Canada, the number of people who go bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills is... ZERO.