Ot Bradley Manning

[BillyBobT]

[e-mail] wrote in news: [e-mail]:

(And like we lost with Afganistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc)

[trader4]

As exemplified by Obama.

[Robert Green]

They were only in our pocket as long as they were alive and in power. The problem is that many were already slipping. The CIA & Friends have been obsessed with regime change just for the sake of regime change for a long, long time, going back beyond the Bay of Pigs. I believe one reason is that they think they'll always get a better (or at least cheaper) deal with the new regime, despite that goal rarely being reached. We've backed a lot of losers from Diem to the Shah to Karzai. It's clearly not an exact science.

I'd bet that at least a few of those Muslim brothers are really CIA operatives, getting into very deep cover assignments. The CIA took quite a beating after 9/11 over not using enough HUMINT and too much ELINT. I'm sure there are plenty more spy boots on the ground than there used to be, especially with the money that been poured into the intelligence community in the last 12 years, about $1T from most reliable estimates.

Those regimes tend to depend on "strongmen" to hold them together. When they die or lose power, they collapse. Iraq was a perfect example. Take out Saddam and the Shias and the Sunnis had a murderfest.

We may have finally been able to get ahead of the curve and infiltrated the Brotherhood and the leadership of these countries for years to come. With or without Wikileaks, guys like Khaddafi and Assad were going to get pushed aside and changes were going to happen. Manning just hurried it along a little. I just find it surprising how little real damage was done to US interests by the leaks. I smell a rat - it's too neat.

I hope not. One of the reasons we're so deep in debt is that we volunteer to be the world's police force. I saw let the countries we protect start paying for the privilege. I'm actually quite proud of Obama for resisting the very strong prodding from Israel to lead a pre-emptive strike on Iran. I think we would already be into it if Romney had won the election. We haven't heard quite so much saber rattling from Netanyahu after he apparently backed the wrong horse in the election and his own people voted for a more moderate approach.

The idea the we are going to be able to perpetually bomb Iran out of creating a nuclear weapon is as dumb as believing we could deny Al Qeda any place on earth to build training camps. Both Bush and Obama pushed that dumb line of reasoning. It's nonsensical on the face of it. We chased them out of Afghanistan, all right, straight into Pakistan.

There's enough trouble brewing the world already that we really need to carefully pick our battles. Bombing Iran might delay them some, but each attack drives them deeper underground, makes them more determined to succeed and gives them a pretty strong revenge motive to use the bombs when they finally make them. They are already so deep that even our enhanced blockbuster bombs may not be able to reach them. Eventually all their nuclear facilities will be battle-hardened in places where we can't reach them.

The problem with Iran is that they have dumb leaders that say things at least as stupid as Joe Biden. I don't think most Iranians are really into the theocracy and it will eventually disappear as the advance, technologically.

The Iranian problem isn't going to be solved by bombing. Besides, we have other fish to fry. It's not like there isn't already a Muslim country with nuclear weapons (Pakistan) that we are pissing off daily with drone attacks. Obama seems to think they're all grateful for our invasions of their sovereignty but I'm not so sure based on some of the things I've read.

Japan, China, Korea, etc. are going to be the focus of DoD now. The Far East is a much more contentious area than most Americans know. There's going to be a serious (meaning deadly) dust up very soon now because the frequency and the seriousness of the encounters has been escalating.

There are a number of unresolved disputes all throughout the Far East that are just waiting to boil over. China's educated young are not finding jobs, and if their economy tanks, they'll be looking for someone to blame. The People's Liberation Army has recently been accused of a series of cyberattacks against our major DoD sites.

"The dice are rolling, I can feel it mister!" (-:

[harry]

Yes, all true.