US Uses Iraq to Fight Hezbollah
The Iraq invasion was a bad idea poorly executed by incompetents, but at least it comes in handy once in a while. We used our influence in Iraq to deny an Iranian plane permission to fly through Iraqi airspace. We then leaned on Turkey to make sure the plane couldn’t go around Iraq. The plane, which was loaded with missiles destined for Hezbollah in Damascus, was forced to turn around.
- July 15: Three days after the war began, a source tipped off U.S. intelligence about an imminent shipment of missiles from Iran to Hezbollah.
- July 19: A spy satellite photographed Iranian crews loading three missile launchers and eight crates, each normally used to carry a Chinese-designed C-802 Noor missile, aboard a transport plane at Mehrabad air base near Tehran. Israel says Hezbollah fired a C-802, a precision-guided anti-ship cruise missile, at an Israeli warship off Lebanon’s coast on July 14.
- July 20: The Ilyushin Il-76 transport plane left for Damascus, but Iraqi air-traffic controllers denied it permission to enter Iraq’s airspace. The Iranian flight crew then requested permission to fly over Turkey. Turkish controllers granted permission — but only if the plane would land for an inspection. The plane returned to Tehran, where the military cargo was unloaded.
- July 22: The plane flew humanitarian aid to Damascus after stopping for inspection in Turkey.
Stuff like that represents the upside of the invasion– using Iraq to the strategic advantage of America and its allies. Unfortunately, those benefits are dwarfed by the pain and cost Iraq has given us so far.
August 18th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
I’m not purposely trying to be rude, but that has to be one of the dumbest things you’ve ever said here.
By any objective standard, the Iraq War has cost us far less in both blood and money than any previous war in the past 100 years (excepting of course, Gulf War I, the premature ending of which led us to our current predicament).
The number of combat deaths in Korea were approximately 10-fold higher in a shorter period of time. In addition, we have paid billions to keep some 50,000 troops there for the past half-century. Was that a poor investment? Is the presence of a stable democracy in South Korea worth that “pain and cost”?
You note that the Iraq War has given us the strategic advantage of keeping tabs on the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism — Iran. But that advantage isn’t free, and you can expect the Iranians, like the Soviets before them, to do their best to undermine our efforts. But we will stay there, just as we stayed in Europe after World War II: Our national survival depends on it. And the majority of Iraqis will support it, because they know their national survival depends on it.
So even if Hillary becomes president in 2008, we still will have about 100,000 troops in Iraq. And after she’s voted out in 2012, they’ll still be there. Because as unpleasant as Hillary might be, she’s not stupid. She knows if we leave the Middle East to Iran, it will be the same as if we left Western Europe to the Soviets.
Except we didn’t import most of our oil from Europe.
August 18th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
Holly,
Thanks for confining your rudeness to the unintentional sort.
The tabs we’re keeping on Iran is via satellite pictures, as you’ll note from that article, so I’m not sure how Iraq helps there. And, frankly, Iraq was sinking a lot of effort into countering Iran, so I see us being there as an assumption of a burden somebody was already carrying to a degree. Moreover, I don’t see stopping the odd missile shipment to Hezbollah as a huge victory.
You really think our national survival depends on us being in Iraq? I just don’t see it that way. Any scenario under which America is devastated by a threat from that region is either extremely remote and/or not much diminished by us being in Iraq.
It’s taken a lot of resources to puff up the Iraqi threat and then bungle our way through cleaning up our mess there. We could have put that into finishing the job in Afghanistan, persuading Pakistan to let us capture Bin Laden, policing the Lebanon-Israeli border, leaning on Syria and Iran, etc., etc.
August 19th, 2006 at 12:16 am
Captain Holly:
It could have been worse; you could have said that most of the other stuff BH has said here is dumber still.
August 20th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
That’s assuming the only terrorist threat to us is from Al-Qaeda. In reality, the Iranians have been preparing for a war with us since they first took the hostages in 1979. Had they not been distracted by a war with Iraq in the 1980’s they probably would have done alot more than threaten our tankers with torpedo boats. In the past when they’ve caused us some trouble they’ve had to back down when confronted militarily.
That will soon change when the Iranians get the bomb. That’s why they feel a freer hand to stir up trouble in Lebanon and Iraq; that’s why the Arab world is surprisingly hostile to Hezbollah. The Gulf States especially have feared the mullahs in Iran and their potent combination of Shi’ite extremism and military adventurism, which explains why they bankrolled much of the cost of Saddam’s war during the ’80’s, which also explains why the smaller Gulf States are eager to host US bases.
Leaving Iraq right now or even in the next 20 years would be a strategic disaster. It would leave the Iraqis and the Gulf States vulnerable to a nuclear-armed Iran, one that is led by a president who openly believes he has been divinely chosen to usher in the Shi’ite version of the Apocalypse. It would probably create a full-scale civil war in Iraq, which in turn would involve almost all of the Gulf States and inevitably the US because the price of oil would explode and we would still have troops and ships in Kuwait and Qatar. And it would also lead to a war between Israel and Syria. In short, the whole kettle would blow up.
I’m sure your next argument is that things would have been just peachy if we only had kept out of Iraq. Hardly. Saddam would probably have been able to get sanctions lifted by now and he would be going full-tilt towards rebuilding his WMD capabilities in order to keep Iran at bay. He would also be eager for payback against the Kuwaitis and Saudis, which in turn would force us to keep a substantial troop presence there to counteract him.
Like it or not, we cannot live the Libertarian fantasy of selling out Israel and turning our back on the Middle East, even if we didn’t import a drop of oil from there. Because the rest of the world does depend on oil, and most of the known reserves are in the Gulf. A nuclear-armed Iran, with oil money to stir up trouble, is no different than the Soviet Union in the 1960’s. Sooner or later, we will have to confront them. You may not like it, but that’s the way it is. And I maintain that any serious Democrat with national ambitions understands that as well, no matter what they might have said to the moonbats at the Yearly Kos convention.
August 26th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
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