[DomusAlbion]

I believe Israel will indeed act on its own and within a year. The US will probably supply some intelligence but will appear to be neutral and may even condemn the raid. However, the US forces will have been built up in the region ready for the consequences.

Israel has in the past acted against Iraq and Syria. It is a matter of national survival for them.

This could trigger a regional war. Iran could strike out at US forces and all the Persian Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia.

Then we'll all be walking to work.

[Cog]

An imminent attack on Iran by Israel has been in the news for as long as the internet has existed.

[Windmills]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'A')n imminent attack on Iran by Israel has been in the news for as long as the internet has existed.

[careinke]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'A')n imminent attack on Iran by Israel has been in the news for as long as the internet has existed.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Windmills', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'A')n imminent attack on Iran by Israel has been in the news for as long as the internet has existed.

[DomusAlbion]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')here is a big pipeline running along the border between KSA and Iraq that makes a great radar screen for low flying aircraft.

[Cloud9]

Imagine for a moment you lived in a world where your neighbor absolutely hated you. Every morning when you went out to pick up your paper he was standing there glaring at you. When you walked by, he commented: “One day I will level your house and kill you and your entire family.”

In as much as you live in a world of policemen and laws, you go through the process of obtaining restraining orders and no trespass orders. You live your life in a constant state of alert with ready access to a phone and 911.

And then one day, you get a notice from the police department informing you that they will no longer respond to issues in your area.

I don’t know what you would do, but I know exactly what I would do. I would take my neighbor at his word and exercise my right of self defense.

[efarmer]

There is always a dream in faith driven governments. It usually revolves around a theme of
an epochal struggle where the faith based folks are proven to be prescient and correct.
There is perhaps a small snag in this, Persians or Iranians are essentially good folks with a
very fuc*ed up government, so are Saudis. Yemenis, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Somalis,
Russians, Frenchman, Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, and so on a so forth until you tile up
about 70% of the national entities. Now let's finish off with Americans.

We have one politcal party that knows concentrated wealth defeats demographics
and democracy via media, leverage, and if required brute force. We have another
party that believes manipulation of government money and power will make unmotivated
people able to thrive and equalize the situation and seek a dream that may or may not
manifest for them due to the reality of the world we are now living in. Finally we have
some political parties that think if we reduce our choices to some sort of return to the
principles in play in the 18th century, somehow a gutsy thereom and experiment by our
founders becomes absolutely infallible and waits in the wings to kick in and right things like
a UPS backup for a PC when the mains AC power fails whilst we browse for solutions.

This of course is a large and rumpled paper bag of dicks.

It is simpler than this. America survived and thrived because of basic physics. It was a
game that was not fair but has some fantastic featres. The central good point was that if you
worked hard, or were lucky, or had a collaborative family, or some such good feature,
you could move from impoverished to the great holding tank of the middle class, and from
there you could hang comfortable, slide back down, of rise to the upper class, according
to health, and intellect, and luck, or pure persistence. The Republicans seek to take this
apart, the Democrats seek to make the process and government assisted process to buy votes,
or a process wherein skill, and luck, and pluck is replaced by provable minority or disadvantage
criteria. This is a race to the bottom.

I see America as a very high voltage upper class and very low voltage lower class, that is only insulated by a dynamic middle class. When this insulation is broken down by the Republican notion of rich people trickling opportunity down (which they have zero motivation to do with Cheap Asian Labor
as an alternative) to augment everyone else in our nation, or poor people moving up not on merit but on politcal connection or entitlement, then the insulation and incentive of achieving of our middle class is gone.

What is left is very low voltage or ground potential dealing with the high voltage of power, money, and
class, without the insulation of a middle class, and this invokes arcing, and sparking, and all the nasty
things that take place when differential potentials break down without an insulation layer.

Upper and lower classes are an inevitable reality of human existance. Don't we dare attempt to export
Democracy again without understanding that if we do so with the design feature of our own middle
class or a middle class for the importers of our Democracy, we are in fact exporting the same high and
low voltage version of our present system without middle class insulation that will electrocute the
folks at both ends of the financial potential and leave the best and brightest of lesser means no path
to attain recognition and comfort for their skills, intellect, and efforts, short of a civil war.

We seem to collectively think we are a proven experiment that needs restoration of renewel,
but in act we needa big makeover with pancake makeup.

Israel has boxed herself into a corner of needing to use military power to prove their cred.
We are stupid to follow such a shallow and hasty example.

[ColossalContrarian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('careinke', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'A')n imminent attack on Iran by Israel has been in the news for as long as the internet has existed.

[argyle]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cloud9', 'I')magine for a moment you lived in a world where your neighbor absolutely hated you. Every morning when you went out to pick up your paper he was standing there glaring at you. When you walked by, he commented: “One day I will level your house and kill you and your entire family.”

In as much as you live in a world of policemen and laws, you go through the process of obtaining restraining orders and no trespass orders. You live your life in a constant state of alert with ready access to a phone and 911.

And then one day, you get a notice from the police department informing you that they will no longer respond to issues in your area.

I don’t know what you would do, but I know exactly what I would do. I would take my neighbor at his word and exercise my right of self defense.

[Timo]

A pure and true secular system of governance is fundamentally all that can hope to save mankind from its delusions of religion. Unfortunately, we're all human, and lack that capacity for the requisite thoughts necessary to survive. Homosapiens will survive to the genuine end of days, but not in any societal structure. Everyone for himself. Screw civilization! Who needs it!

[Fishman]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ') A pure and true secular system of governance is fundamentally all that can hope to save mankind from its delusions of religion

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Fishman', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ') A pure and true secular system of governance is fundamentally all that can hope to save mankind from its delusions of religion

[Ferretlover]

As this topic has already been discussed, I have merged it with this thread. Carry On.

[Keith_McClary]

Seen this graphic of US bases ? Without Iraq there are just a few small sultanates, kingdoms and emirates, leftover Brit imperial protectorates.

[PrestonSturges]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Fishman', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ') A pure and true secular system of governance is fundamentally all that can hope to save mankind from its delusions of religion

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', '[')b]For evangelicals it's all about Genuine Armageddon.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hile only 36 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible is God's Word and should be taken literally, 59 percent say they believe that events predicted in the Book of Revelation will come to pass. Almost one out of four Americans believes that 9/11 was predicted in the Bible, and nearly one in five believes that he or she will live long enough to see the end of the world. Even more significant for this study, over one-third of those Americans who support Israel report that they do so because they believe the Bible teaches that the Jews must possess their own country in the Holy Land before Jesus can return.

Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christi ... z1ceoYQ500

[PrestonSturges]

Believe in the comic book version of the Rapture drops off significantly above the Mason Dixon line.

Wikipedia has many articles on eschatology. If you want to be a dick, ask an evangelical if they are a Premillenial Dispensationalist, and it irks them because they don't know if they are supposed to flip the Religious Indignation switch (ie right wing Political Correctness) on not.

As Christianity stole pretty much all its stories from older religions, it seems like the whole Book of Revelation was lifted from Zoroastrianism, although the dates of Zoroastrian writings are sketchy.

But I tend to side with Thomas Jefferson
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')o man on earth has less taste or talent for criticism than myself and least and last of all should I undertake to criticise works on the Apocalypse. It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it and I then considered it as merely the ravings of a maniac no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.

[gollum]

MSNBC has a story that all Israeli government web sites are down due to a "malfunction"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45182785/ns ... d_gadgets/

[argyle]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tyler_JC', 'A')nd what happens to the Israeli settlements?

There are half a million Israelis living in Palestinian territory. Are they to be forcibly removed? Incorporated into Palestine?

Until the world has some kind of reasonable answer to that question, a two state solution will be impossible.



As it stands, there isn't enough Palestine left to build a country.