www.exile.ru/2005-January-27/war_nerd.html
Next (12) Everybody's asking me what'll happen if we attack Iran. To get a quick pr eview, just do what this guy in my eighth-grade class did: put a firecra cker in your mouth, hold it between your front teeth, and light the fuse . So when it blows up in your face, you'll expect them to be impressed. And you'll be surpris ed, just like this guy in junior high was surprised, when all you get is a perforated eardrum and a reputation as the biggest dumbass in the sch ool. Right now, Bush is standing there with a lit match and a big firecracker labeled "Iran" in his mouth. Except it's more like an M-80 or a whole st ick of dynamite than a firecracker. Nobody believes he'll be dumb enough to light it, to actually attack Iran. Khameini, their head Mullah, said last week "America is in no positio n to invade Iran." a war with Iran wou ld mean calling up every National Guard unit we have. Even then, it woul d take years to get them combat-ready. Khameini was making the same mistake everybody's been making: assuming Bush and his cronies have a lick of sense. The best way of guessing what Bush will do is asking, what's the worst th ing he could do to America? I thin k he's been possessed by bin Laden, because everything he's done has bee n exactly what Al Quaeda hoped for. Right now, bin Laden is praying to A llah that we'll be stupid enough to attack Iran. That would be the cherr y on his halal sundae, the one thing that could actually finish us off a s a Superpower. In my "Quagmire Bowl" article I said the Iraq war probably wouldn't be fa tal. It's definitely hurt us, but it won't mean the downfall of America. Invading the wrong country can age you faster than driving a Long Beach b us on the night shift. Invading Iran helped end the win-streak of the be st, biggest Empire of all, the Romans. It was in 260 AD, when emperor Va lerius headed east to deal with the Persians who were kickin' up a fuss on the eastern border of the Empire. He charged right into Iraq -- they called it Mesopotamia back then -- even though his troops were dying of plague all around him. The Persians sat back, watched Roman troops keeling over , and had a good laugh, eating pistachios in the shade while Valerian tr ied to figure out what to do. It reminds me of what one of MacArthur's aides sa id about him: "When it paid to be aggressive, he was aggressive. Valerian figured a little proactive salesmanship would settle things, so he demanded a meeting with the Persian emperor, Sapor--who couldn't beli eve his luck. Sapor ordered the slaves to cook a big banquet, bring out the best silverware -- and had his troops hide in the banquet hall till he gave the signal. Valerian stomped in, Sapor snapped his fingers and V alerian ended up a live trophy, dragged around in chains through every c ity in the Persian empire till his purple robes were shreds. There's a moral to this story: Persians are tricky, clever people. You don't want people like that for enemie s Unfortunately, Bush won't be leading the charge the way Valerian did, so we probably won't get to see him dragged through Tehran in chains. B ut we'll see worse things: casualty lists that will make Iraq look like a beach volleyball game, American armies losing conventional battles, an d after a few years, a humiliating exit. First of all, it's p hysically way bigger, three times the size of Iraq. The population is 65 million, nearly three times as many as Iraq. The Iranians are young, to o Their birthrate is way down now, around 2 kids per woman, but back in the Khomeini years it was one of the highest in the world. So right now , the Iranian population has a demographic profile that's a military pla nner's dream: not too many little kids to take care of, but a huge pool of fighting-age men -- about 18 million. Bush the Yale cheerleader And it won't be just young, fit men fighting us. Thanks to the invention of the suicide car bomb, guerrilla commanders will have someplace to sen d 70 year old volunteers: down to the garage to pick up a Plymouth packe d full of fertilizer bomb. You don't have to be young to put the pedal t o the metal. The insurgents' DMV test will be real simple: "OK, Grandpa, can you make out the silhouette of a Bradley or Humvee, and aim your car at it?" They hand you the keys, and you get a quick, painless martyr's exit. Everybody will want to get in on the fun: Grandpa, Grandm a, even the cripples, with specially adapted pedals so they can chin-pil ot their car bombs into our patrols. The suicide car bomb is a good example of why I don't worship hardware li ke most war fans do. These cars are actually no-tech guided surface-to-s urface cruise missiles--and damn effective. All it takes is a driver who's willing to die for the pleasure of killing the enemy. Put him (or her) in an old jalopy stuffed with ferti lizer and detonators and you've got a highly accurate, fire-and-forget m issile. They're especially deadly in urban warfare, because they're perfectly cam ouflaged till they actually blow up. And all for the price of a used car and a few bags of Miracle Gro. They can be launc hed from subs, surface ships, planes and ground launchers. They can guid e themselves over hundreds of miles, they cost millions apiece (usually hundreds of times as much as the huts or sheds we aim them at)--but they 're useless to us in Iraq, whereas the suicide car-bomb cruise missiles are hurting us every single day. It's the software inside people's heads that wins wars nowadays. You hard ware freaks are going to have to face that fact one of these days. And i t's this brain-software that we're hopeless at programming. Iraq has pro ved pretty clearly we don't have a clue how to use the Middle-Eastern br ain OS. In fact, we've actually done the impossible: reprogrammed the mi serable, cowardly Iraqis into fierce warriors. Remember those pitiful fags crawling up to our soldi ers to surrender on their hands and knees, sobbing like babies? Two year s of occupation by Bush's morons has turned those cowards into fearless kamikazes in Oldsmobiles. So just imagine what the Iranians, the original Islamic suicide squads, w ill do when we invade. There'll be traffic jams, ten-mile backups, outsi de every US base, thousands of car bombers honking and changing lanes tr ying to get to the front of the line and make that final commute to Para dise. It'll be like the San Diego freeway on a Monday morning, except th e fenderbenders will be a little more serious. The Iranians, unlike the Iraqis, have always been willing to die for thei r country. In the Iran-Iraq War (1980-89) thousands of Iranians voluntee red to charge across Iraqi minefields, knowing they were going to die. They threw everything at those craz y Persian suicide charges, even poison gas. If you want a more complete account of that war, read my column, "The War Nobody Watched" in eXile #178. The short version is simple: Ira nians are brave, determined people. Of course all the NeoCon crazies are peddling the old story that "once we invade, the people will rally to the cause of freedom." If we couldn't get people on our side a fter deposing a monster like Saddam, what chance do you think we have of winning hearts and minds in Iran? The kids in Iran are pissed off at th e way the old Mullahs won't let 'em rock and roll, but the idea that the y'll support an American invasion because they're bored is totally insan e It's like imagining that the kids in Footloose would've backed a Sovi et invasion of Nebraska because John Lithgow wouldn't let them hold scho ol dances. The argument between Mullahs and kids in Iran is a classic family fight. And you know what happens when some intruder crashes in on the middle of one of those: the whole family unites in about a millisecond and tears him apart. They have since 1953, when the CIA staged a coup to get rid of a popular Lefty Prime Minister, Mossadeq. Way back i n the 70s, when most of the world still kinda liked us, crowds in Tehran chanted "Marg bar Amrika," "Death to America." We're also getting told we'll be able to exploit the ethnic divisions ins ide Iran. The fact is, Iran's ethnic problems are nowhere near as bad as Iraq...
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