Dear Western Powers, esp. America, the Middle East is getting on to you.

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

Watch your step
This diary from Daily is sending shivers up my spine... the jackasses in teh Bush Adminsitration are apparently proposing a blockade of Iran. And several dumb Democrats support the Bill, as if they have NO FUCKING CLUE WHAT IS GOING ON IN IRAQ!

Here are a couple of the articles that it references:

Attacking Iran will trigger all-out regional War

If US forces strike Iranian nuclear facilities, Tehran will respond by triggering an all-out regional war, Iranian officials said last week in an interview with the Defense News weekly.
“Ballistic missiles would be fired in masses against targets in Persian Gulf states and Israel,” one Foreign Ministry official said. “The objective would be to overwhelm US missile defense systems with dozens and maybe hundreds of missiles fired simultaneously at specific targets.”

According to the officials, Tehran’s primary targets would be US military installations and strategic targets in US-allied Arabian Gulf states, including oil depots, refineries, power plants and desalination facilities. US warships would also face waves of surface-to-surface cruise missiles sent to overwhelm their countermeasures. The newspaper quotes a number of Iranian officials whose comments reflect Tehran's official line but who could not obtain permission to speak on the record at short notice. US warships would also face waves of surface-to-surface cruise missiles sent to overwhelm their countermeasures.One Iranian official with knowledge of the leadership’s national-security discussions said his country’s leaders anticipate that US forces will strike with no warning against the military’s command-and-control network, and have ordered ballistic- and cruise-missile battery crews to launch the retaliation plan within an hour after a US attack begins.
“The US will be as surprised with Iranian military capabilities as the Israelis were with Hizbullah in last summer’s war in Lebanon,” he said. “Most of our people are confident we would give the Americans hell and likely emerge victorious.”

"liberating" Iran, Enslaving the USA

The Bush administration is reportedly considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. Many people have commented on how the U.S. military is already overstretched and cannot afford another major war. But little attention has been focused on how the American political system is also at the breaking point.

If the U.S. attacks Iran, experts predict that Hezbollah and other terrorist groups will launch counterattacks against American targets here and abroad. Hezbollah is widely perceived as being far better organized than was Al Qaeda in 2001. Hezbollah’s attacks drove the U.S. military out of Beirut in the early 1980s and helped drive the Israeli Defense Force out of Lebanon in 2000 and again in 2006. Can the federal government defend Americans against a competent, determined terrorist opponent? Unfortunately, numerous reports by the Government Accountability Office and other federal auditors reveal that U.S. antiterrorism defenses continue to be little more than bureaucratic papier mache:

*In late 2005, undercover federal investigators smuggled enough radioactive material through U.S. checkpoints on the Canadian and Mexican borders to build two “dirty” bombs.

* Transportation Security Administration airport screeners are as incompetent at detecting weapons and other threat objects as were the private screeners on the job in 2001, according to an Inspector General report last year.

...

There's more. WAY more.

Coincidentally, I hopped over to Firedoglake and found this article:

The Hidden Army:Hezbollah teaches the World how to fight

Hezbollah's army is a secret one. It's like an old fashioned spy agency.

It doesn't exist.

If you're enrolled in it, you don't tell anyone. The war was rife with stories of soldiers being killed, and their families finding out for the first time that they were even in Hezbollah's army. This, of course, is to make it impossible to use assassination, mostly aerial assassination, to take out key leaders.

Hezbollah is an almost perfect Darwinian organization. Israel uses informants and assassination? Great - we'll keep even our membership secret. Israel uses air power? We'll dig tunnels and set up aeriel blinds for our missile launchers. Israel doesn't like taking heavy infantry casualties - fine then, we'll set up overlapping bunkers which simply cannot be cleared without taking losses.

Hezbollah has created the new model army, and a new model state. Call it the Hidden Army. An army that blends in with the population, that moves only when it cannot be seen, that sets up in the expectation of surveillance. An army that knows all the high tech games, and spent the time to figure out how to nullify them. It sounds like a guerilla army, and it is, but it's also much more: it's an army capable of engaging in strategic warfare and an army capable of engaging in full on attrition defense warfare against Israeli main battle forces. It's hard to overstate how impressive this is.

...

We are going to see many more of these unrecognized governments, with their hidden armies. Why? Because they work, and they work very well, both at providing government services to a population, and at frustrating much larger, more powerful and expensive conventional armies.

In the comments, I found more links:


Hezbollah's Communication Network


From Lebanon to Iraq, we're in deep Shia now

People. call your Congress. DO NOT allow this shit to go through.

Comments

[doktor-x.livejournal.com]

Bush = Insane

Sometimes I really get the feeling he thinks he’s been given the job of bringing on Armageddon so that Jesus will come back… There is no rational excuse to attack Iran. They haven’t done ANYTHING! Oh sure they meddle in their own back yard, but so do we (far more than they do), and so does Israel, and so does everyone else.. Hell, they were actually *helping* us in Afghanistan until George decided to declare them officially evil.. Moron….

[unusualmusic.livejournal.com]

Moron is really too kind a word to use on that species of humanity.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

You might know - did Obama say something like "People tried to label me as being on the left during the primary..."?

[unusualmusic.livejournal.com]

He said something to the effect that his policies weren't liberal, they were simple commonsense, or something like that when he was tackled by some reporter.