Spareink

I can elaborate on any if these if you like, but here are my six assertions:

1. Iran is not the author of a bid for world dominance with Venezuela.

2. Whether or not Iranian (or any rogue state) missiles can hit the US is beside the point. Whether they have nukes and support terrorists, however, is very relevant.

3. The US is not positioned to invade Iran and defeat it politically. The US is already in a conflict with Iran over Iraq. Whether their nukes can be taken out by tactical force is unknowable (to most of us).

4. The only choices to be made with regard to a regional war in the middle east are whether the US should draft millions of Americans into this effort or withdraw from Iraq as a strategic asset.

5. WWIV would be over Taiwan.

6. I am surprised Russia did not make it on your axis list.

My point is that Iran is partnering with Venezuela to increase its ability to deter a preemptive attack by the US.

Re#2, the nuke issue is somewhat overrated. Chem/Bio/Dirty attacks are also of concern. Does Venezuela have plausible deniability about what is going on in Iranian "factories" in Caracas?

Re#3-4. We need many fewer troops if we are willing to accept higher levels of collateral damage. The only reason it seems like we need millions of troops is that we have been fighting wars very (excessively?) carefully.

Re #5. My point is that the best opportunity for China in Taiwan is while the US is occupied with Venezuela and Iran.

Re #6. Russia does not have conventional troop strength. It is also for sale, and we have the $$ to buy it.

Fair enough. Allow me to rebut/refine

>My point is that Iran is partnering with Venezuela to increase its ability to deter a >preemptive attack by the US.

I don't agree that Iran views any kind of missile attack as it’s strongest deterrent against a US preemptive strike. And if I understood you correctly, you mean that what Venezuela offers Iran is geographical proximity to Miami (or thereabouts). If Iran decided to do as much damage to the US as possible, it would do it through the use of it’s intelligence services. If you were looking for a common denominator between the two countries, it would be China. Iran, China, and Venezuela all place the security of their oil flow above all else. This is where I think O’Grady is off is in suggesting Venezuela and Iran are linked only in some mutual penchant for general assholery, and where I suspect that if any country is pulling a fast one here it is the one whose fingerprints are pointedly not being proclaimed loudly in the state-run Iranian press.

>Re#2, the nuke issue is somewhat overrated. Chem/Bio/Dirty attacks are also of concern. Does Venezuela have plausible deniability about what is going on in Iranian "factories" in Caracas?

True, but would the US have plausible supportability about what is going on? My larger point here would be that at least when you’re discussing nukes, there is ultimately a finite amount of fissile material in the world decisively in question. If you’re talking about the potential for anthrax being grown in a bathtub, I could present Estonia, Paraguay and Micronesia as the new axis if those governments cannot plausibly deny their potential for factories and I find their leaders to be disagreeable. The problem with Chem/Bio/Dirty threats are that the best strategies against them are ultimately the preventive measures developed by the CDC. But if we’re talking about action at the level of a nation-state, absent at least somewhat convincing evidence of nukes or necessarily more convincing evidence about anthrax, that leaves us in the realm of our political estimations about who should be on the ‘axis’- and O’Grady, to me at least, does not yet convince.

>Re#3-4. We need many fewer troops if we are willing to accept higher levels of collateral >>damage. The only reason it seems like we need millions of troops is that we have been fighting wars very (excessively?) carefully.

Let me just sum up what I think about millions vs. a few, collateral damage, and Taiwan, etc. The millions of troops I’m talking about here are the millions that would be necessary for garrisoning, politically convincing the resident population that US authority means social order, and completely re-organizing a huge country like Iran for a very, very long period of time. Most of these millions would be doing skutty, unglamorous jobs as a stabilized Iran is being integrated into the world economy, and even then- no one can really predict exactly what would come of it, and it may, in fact be what’s necessary, but it can’t be done half-way by people essentially uninterested in the world. I take it you mean that if 100,000 US soldiers could route the regular army that ought to be the end of it, and anything thereafter that causes problems is the fault of those too unwilling to accept the collateral repercussions. That’s fine, but it isn’t the world we live in- personally, I wish one assassin could have gone in and fixed Saddam Hussein, and everything else would have sorted itself out, but of course that could never have solved Iraq’s problems.

As for China, I think Taiwan is still a ways off regardless of what happens with Iran- and that the way it would actually happen would be more of a naval engagement where GPS and JDAMs would, in that case, matter more than the whether or not there’re millions of troops available. Some say the US carrier fleet, which is the basis of our conventional strength against China, is already obsolete to China’s missiles. Until it gets to that point though, I think China is going to very indirectly do what it thinks it can get away with in the court of world opinion; not support the US in Iraq, be expanding it’s trade relationships, fiddling around with the current accounts deficit- etc. I agree, though, that the more hard power the US is forced to exercise in the world comes at US cost and China’s gain.

I tend to agree with much of what is written above and will not bother with debating any of it.

I will simply add to it.

As I see it, the Axis is a superset of the above: The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation / Axis + key countries along the SCO's periphery (including Iran, the DPRK, Laos, Myanmar and others) + the emerging metastasis of Castroism / Guevaraism along the Caribbean litoral and including Brazil and TBD other Caribbean and Latin American countries. This is truly frightening for what it means is that this next World War Axis has:
* The largest weapons arsenal in the world, vastly superior in both numbers and technological breadth (but not necessarily depth) to the West
* The largest number of troops (the PRC alone accomplishes that feat)
* The largest core land area ever held be an emerging conquering procrustean assemblage
* The most resources ever controlled by such an assemblage.

Based on all that, I must conclude that for the first time in human history, there exists an emerging conquering force capable of realising the dream of Cyrus. We may see it in some of our lifetimes.