This will start some

[Ecomike]

Iraq in control of Iran? You have to be joking....

Right now, the Iraqi's barely have an Air Force. We're teaching them to fly all over again...with what compares to basically a prop driven Cessna....they only recently started flying very small cargo planes and maybe some choppers...but the have no air defense, no fighters, no bombers.....no missile defense....

Oh and Iraq has no Navy....

Not sure what Iraq would need a navy for, but you have a point on the defense issues.

But I just an interesting thought. What if we pulled out of Iraq, freeing up our troops to handle Afganistan, then let Iran deal with the problems in Iraq. Even if Iran took over Iraq, or Syria and Iran, it would keep them busy trying to deal with the civil war, sectarian violence, for quite some time. You know, the saying, something about idle hands......Then Iran would be too busy cleaning our mess in Iraq to start any new trouble for a while.

 

[Ecomike]

Hmm, not to my knowledge, We would take off from Willow Grove Naval Airstation, fly south over Philly then gradually turn east which would bring us over the oil termnials on the lower Delaware or we would turn earlier and go over bayonne and that area in NJ. The port would be empty, then we'd head out towards the 50 fathom curve [about 75+ miles out] and head either north towards Brunswick Maine or south to jacksonville where we would refuel, depended on the patrol we were on. About the time we would turn the pilot, co pilot and radio operator [me] would start counting tankers at anchor and reporting them back to command at the end of the count as we passed different port areas.
Lets be a little creative here, you own a bunch of tankers and you fly a flag of convenience [there are no more US flagged tankers by the way], you sail into an oil port in almost any country with oil wells, you buy it on the spot market for a few bucks a barrel under what the stock exchange says it's trading for and head for the US, in the mean time the price goes up, so far you have not sold the oil you bought, you gamble it will go up again, remember you are carrying a hundred thousand + barrels so a $5 increase is half a million, your tanker has a 15 man crew at say $1,000 per person a day, do you pull into port and sell it or anchor off shore as the price climbs. Me, I'd sit on it, pay the crew and sell it at a nice profit. On the other side the price is dropping so you presell it at an agreed upon price. Remember your ship is registered in Liberia or other flag so your transactions are not under the watchful eye of the IRS or the US govt. They can examine your logs but not your bank book...
My FiL was a master mariner and super tanker captain before he started running Mobils fleet and safety division, he was with them for over 30 years, he was also the head of the Liberian shipping council for a few years. I used to hear all the good stuff

Was that in 73 or 79? If it was in 73 the parked tankers could have been part of the OPEC oil embargo, yes? OPEC flaged ships, dangling oil offshore at us as a way to make their point :twak: to us? But it sounds like you are saying Exxon-Mobil took advantage of the OPEC oil embargo to cut supply further and boost prices.

Were any of those supertankers back then? Where they anchored offshore and pumping the oil to the shore via a pipeline? I don't know or recall enough about the supertankers historical timelines, but I recall plans early on to set up the supertankers to anchore way offshore and have them pump the oil to shore.
Anyway, intersting postes, story and hands on history there, just digging for the rest of the story, the good stuff as you put it!

 

[Ecomike]

Its easy;

1965-1967: 295 Dems, 140 Rep in the House
1967-1969: 249 Dems, 187 Rep
1969-1971: 243 Dems, 192 Rep
1971-1973: 255 Dems, 180 Rep
1973-1975: 242 Dems, 192 Rep

We couldn't possibly blame the Democrats for failures during that war.

Back then the US Senate and US Congress had little power or authority over the war. The President and US Military advisers are the ones I blame. I have no problem blaming JFK and especially LBJ for getting us over involved in and over committed in the Vietnam war. After the VNW ended Congress pasted the War Powers Act to try and stop another Vietnam from happing again, but 9/11 and the the Bush neo conservatives used 9/11 to put Congress in an untenable position that forced them to vote the authority back over to the President, or risk looking unpatriotic. Obama was one of the few with enough balls to vote his conscious and buck the trend, rather than take the easy politically expediant route. I was also opposed to the invasion from day one.

In fact back then in the early days of the Vietnam war everyone was too patriotic and too wrapped up in flag waving and the cold war ideology, remnants of the McCarthy Era when we were lead to believe there was a pinko commi spy hiding underneath every chair, to even consider asking the questions that should have been asked back in 1960 or even earlier under Eisenhower. China was not about to let the west control a critical food supply in SEA that they needed, and had we ever invaded NV the Chinese army would have moved into NV, which could have led to WWIII, so we were left fighting a defensive civil war, someone elses civil war, with our hands tied behind our backs.

 

[JNickel101]

Not sure what Iraq would need a navy for, but you have a point on the defense issues.

But I just an interesting thought. What if we pulled out of Iraq, freeing up our troops to handle Afganistan, then let Iran deal with the problems in Iraq. Even if Iran took over Iraq, or Syria and Iran, it would keep them busy trying to deal with the civil war, sectarian violence, for quite some time. You know, the saying, something about idle hands......Then Iran would be too busy cleaning our mess in Iraq to start any new trouble for a while.

Navy, because Iran has lots of boats....and if we'd pull ours out of the Persian Gulf (or Arabian Gulf as the towel-heads insist on calling it), they'd create havoc on everyone else's oil platforms, ships and the like....

But...

I'd be worried that Iran has an itchy trigger finger with its surface launched missiles....

I'd also be pissed that Iran would probably hit Iraq's newly US-built oil infrastructure....taking about 2.9 million barrels of oil off of the market....

overnight, oil would be up over $200/barrel...and it would be 50 years before we could repair the damage done by Iran's atomic weapons....

 

[fscrig75]

But I just an interesting thought. What if we pulled out of Iraq, freeing up our troops to handle Afganistan, then let Iran deal with the problems in Iraq. Even if Iran took over Iraq, or Syria and Iran, it would keep them busy trying to deal with the civil war, sectarian violence, for quite some time. You know, the saying, something about idle hands......Then Iran would be too busy cleaning our mess in Iraq to start any new trouble for a while.

But thats exactly what we don't want. Iran is 90% Shia muslims, Iraq is 60-65% Shia, this is the same people that Saddam slaughtered for years. They all follow the same religious leader, who is living in Iran. So now Iran has Iraq, they are one big happy Shia family, about 97 million people. Just remember they are Persians and there biggest gripe with the world today is that they are not important enough.
Lets take this to the next step; Iran/Iraq want Kuwait, Kuwait is 70% Sunni and 30% Shia. Shia and Sunni just don't get along some big split in who is supposed to be the religious leader, blah blah blah, regardless they don't like each other. So now Iran/Iraq rolled into Kuwait and has that country. Now they are up to about 100 million people.
Oh the "world" would never let that happen. Well when was the last time France/Russia/China every said a bad thing about Iran? Even if France comes over to oru side, Russia never will! That would put troops right on their border!
But why should Iran/Iraq/Kuwait stop there, Saudi Arabia has next to no military and again their Shia brother are the minority. Remember religion drives everything about these people.

But more important is the fact that Iran now controls all that oil in that region. Thats about 619 BILLION barrels of oil, around 48% of the worlds oil supply.

So everyone can say what ever they want about thats why we need to break our dependency, which I agree with, but we still need oil. We are not going to break our dependency in the amount of time it would take Iran to conquere the middle east, again.
Then we will be in an even bigger war, because 1) We need oil. 2) We will go over there to protect Israel.

Ok yea I reached on some of that, ha ha. But it is something that world leaders are worried about. I got all my info off of WIKI, search Demographics of all the countries mentioned, and then world oil supply.

Have fun beating me up.:cheers:

 

[JNickel101]

Obama was one of the few with enough balls to vote his conscious and buck the trend, rather than take the easy politically expediant route. I was also opposed to the invasion from day one.

There you go again...:bs:

Obama didn't take a seat in the Senate until January 2005...so whatever "vote" you (or he seems to, for that matter) think he had in our initial "invasion" of Iraq, he never had.

I'll say it again....

Obama Had No Vote In Our Decision To Go Into Iraq

 

[JNickel101]

But thats exactly what we don't want. Iran is 90% Shia muslims, Iraq is 60-65% Shia, this is the same people that Saddam slaughtered for years. They all follow the same religious leader, who is living in Iran. So now Iran has Iraq, they are one big happy Shia family, about 97 million people. Just remember they are Persians and there biggest gripe with the world today is that they are not important enough.
Lets take this to the next step; Iran/Iraq want Kuwait, Kuwait is 70% Sunni and 30% Shia. Shia and Sunni just don't get along some big split in who is supposed to be the religious leader, blah blah blah, regardless they don't like each other. So now Iran/Iraq rolled into Kuwait and has that country. Now they are up to about 100 million people.
Oh the "world" would never let that happen. Well when was the last time France/Russia/China every said a bad thing about Iran? Even if France comes over to oru side, Russia never will! That would put troops right on their border!
But why should Iran/Iraq/Kuwait stop there, Saudi Arabia has next to no military and again their Shia brother are the minority. Remember religion drives everything about these people.

But more important is the fact that Iran now controls all that oil in that region. Thats about 619 BILLION barrels of oil, around 48% of the worlds oil supply.

So everyone can say what ever they want about thats why we need to break our dependency, which I agree with, but we still need oil. We are not going to break our dependency in the amount of time it would take Iran to conquere the middle east, again.
Then we will be in an even bigger war, because 1) We need oil. 2) We will go over there to protect Israel.

Ok yea I reached on some of that, ha ha. But it is something that world leaders are worried about. I got all my info off of WIKI, search Demographics of all the countries mentioned, and then world oil supply.

Have fun beating me up.:cheers:

Good post :cheers:

 

[fscrig75]

........ but 9/11 and the the Bush neo conservatives used 9/11 to put Congress in an untenable position that forced them to vote the authority back over to the President, or risk looking unpatriotic. Obama was one of the few with enough balls to vote his conscious and buck the trend, rather than take the easy politically expediant route. I was also opposed to the invasion from day one.

I'm glad Obama had the balls to vote what he thought was right. My whole point here is that a lot of Democrats didn't. Whether they voted because they thought the war was right, they were scared of back lash, whatever, they DID vote to authorize President Bush to use the military. Everyone needs to stop blaming one man, and start holding everyone that voted YES accountable. Republician & Democrats alike!

Didn't the military have to submit requests, to congress, of what targets they wanted to bomb in Vietnam? I might be wrong just what I seem to remember.

 

[Ecomike]

Thanks for the good laugh. The very reason president Ford did nothing was because of the political pressure from a bunch of yellow bellied hippy pot smoking war protesters. It would have been political suicide. He would have been treated the same way president Bush has been treated, he was a coward and people died. We left Vietnam too soon, and many people there were slaughtered as a result. Their blood is on the heads of every single war protester that ever slithered.

A similar thing happened in Somalia during Operation Gothic Serpent. Our troops went in harms way without the support of AC130 gunships, and heavy armor on the ground because then president Clinton did not want to draw the attention of the press, and reap the negative attention from his fellow anti-war protesters.

So the moral of this story is don't start a war we can not win. Don't start a war that will drag out forever and loose American citizen support along the way, resulting in loosing the war. Don't start a war that will kill far more people than not starting the war will kill. But you can start a war that in the long run saves lives, without taken more lives than it saves in the process, and that does not bankrupt the USA or start a civil war in the USA in the process, and so on.

By the way some of those pot smoking yellow bellied pinko commi skum bags as you all like call them did die for what they believed in. They stood up to the National Guard at Ohio State and got shot for protesting the draft and the war, so I don't know just how yellow belied that really makes them. Takes balls to stand up against your own governments guns for what you believe in. Makes them maryters in my book. It was also the turning point when the rest of America finally woke up and realized somethng was terribly wrong here.

 

[fscrig75]

I'm all for people being allowed to protest. Its one of the reason I joined the military, so every can still have their rights as free Americans.

But my question to everyone who says the war is illegal, does that make us criminals? Yes you will say we are just following orders, but so were the Nazis. We are trained not to follow illegal orders.
Probably opening a whole new can of worms but oh well I'm bored. ha ha

 

[JNickel101]

So the moral of this story is don't start a war we can not win. Don't start a war that will drag out forever and loose American citizen support along the way, resulting in loosing the war. Don't start a war that will kill far more people than not starting the war will kill. But you can start a war that in the long run saves lives, without taken more lives than it saves in the process, and that does not bankrupt the USA or start a civil war in the USA in the process, and so on.

By the way some of those pot smoking yellow bellied pinko commi skum bags as you all like call them did die for what they believed in. They stood up to the National Guard at Ohio State and got shot for protesting the draft and the war, so I don't know just how yellow belied that really makes them. Takes balls to stand up against your own governments guns for what you believe in. Makes them maryters in my book. It was also the turning point when the rest of America finally woke up and realized somethng was terribly wrong here.

I think a lot of us would love to go in and fight a war, like WWII, where we could just annihilate everything. Unfortunately, today, we have to fight the PC war. No "innocent lives" lost (regardless of the fact that the enemy we are fighting doesn't play by this rule) and no weapons of mass destruction.

I guarantee if we'd drop one nuke up in the "tribal region" of Pakistan and Afghanistan, it would scare the living shit out of everyone - including Iran - but everyone knows that we'll never be the first to use a nuke in conflict - hell, I'm not even sure we'd have the balls to retaliate with a nuke if one was used against us.

Welcome to the Age of Politically Correct Warfighting.

And as for the guys in Ohio...not sure I'd call them martyrs (or however you spell it). I'd call them something else.....

 

[8Mud]

I'm glad Obama had the balls to vote what he thought was right. My whole point here is that a lot of Democrats didn't. Whether they voted because they thought the war was right, they were scared of back lash, whatever, they DID vote to authorize President Bush to use the military. Everyone needs to stop blaming one man, and start holding everyone that voted YES accountable. Republician & Democrats alike!

Didn't the military have to submit requests, to congress, of what targets they wanted to bomb in Vietnam? I might be wrong just what I seem to remember.

Henry Kissinger was the brains behind that fiasco. The White House micro managed the war, he was the brains and conductor of that train wreck.
Detente was also his brainchild, French term meaning to relax, in Russian it means discharge (gonorrhea).

 

[tbburg]

So the moral of this story is don't start a war we can not win. Don't start a war that will drag out forever and loose American citizen support along the way, resulting in loosing the war. .....

Where to start? Any war we fight will almost immediately loose support. Any war we fight by modern civilized standards will drag out forever.

Don't start a war that will kill far more people than not starting the war will kill. But you can start a war that in the long run saves lives, without taken more lives than it saves in the process, .....

About the only way to fight a war like this would be to fight a conventional war to avoid a nuclear war.

By the way some of those pot smoking yellow bellied pinko commi skum bags as you all like call them did die for what they believed in. They stood up to the National Guard at Ohio State and got shot for protesting the draft and the war, so I don't know just how yellow belied that really makes them.....

The "National Guard" at Kent state consisted of the ROCT cadets. They were mustered to prevent the protesters from occupying and burning the ROTC building on the Kent state campus. So those noble, brave "pot smoking yellow bellied pinko commi skum bags" were standing up to the Jack Booted Thugs who were bent on,...

Allowing any form of protest that did not involve violence or the destruction of state property.

One of the reasons the protesters were as provocative as they were at Kent was because they knew they weren't facing "real troops" or police.

 

[Darky]

So the moral of this story is don't start a war we can not win. Don't start a war that will drag out forever and loose American citizen support along the way, resulting in loosing the war. Don't start a war that will kill far more people than not starting the war will kill. But you can start a war that in the long run saves lives, without taken more lives than it saves in the process, and that does not bankrupt the USA or start a civil war in the USA in the process, and so on.

By the way some of those pot smoking yellow bellied pinko commi skum bags as you all like call them did die for what they believed in. They stood up to the National Guard at Ohio State and got shot for protesting the draft and the war, so I don't know just how yellow belied that really makes them. Takes balls to stand up against your own governments guns for what you believe in. Makes them maryters in my book. It was also the turning point when the rest of America finally woke up and realized somethng was terribly wrong here.

Weren't they throwing rocks at the National Guardsmen? Not exactly "innocent" protesters. Protesting is one thing, assaulting a federal agent is another.

 

[tbburg]

..., assaulting a federal agent is another.

Sorry, but how about "assaulting ANYONE is another" Intentionally injuring or killing anyone during a peaceful protest is kind of,... I don't know, against the grain? Doesn't matter who they work for.

 

[Ecomike]

There you go again...:bs:

Obama didn't take a seat in the Senate until January 2005...so whatever "vote" you (or he seems to, for that matter) think he had in our initial "invasion" of Iraq, he never had.

I'll say it again....

Obama Had No Vote In Our Decision To Go Into Iraq

OK, you win that round, Obama was an Illinois State Senator in 2002, not a US senator at the time, so he did not have a vote in the US Congress, but he did make a public speech where he came out in opposition to the Iraq War "at least as early as October 2, 2002, when he gave a speech against the war at an anti-war rally in Chicago. He gave the speech nine days before the the Joint Resolution to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq (H.J.114), commonly known as the AUMF, which was passed October 11, 2002"

Here is a link to the text of his original speech. Whether you are Dem, Rep or independent, this speech is worth reading.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Barack_Obama's_Iraq_Speech

 

[JNickel101]

LOL....I just like busting the myth on that....

Obama has run his mouth before about how he "has been against the war from the beginning" and "never voted to send troops into Iraq"....

Which is true....

However, he also never voted AGAINST sending troops to Iraq....because he didn't HAVE a vote in the decision! :roflmao:

politicians make me laugh...

 

[tbburg]

politicians make me uke: ...

Fixed it for ya.

 

[Ecomike]

Thanks for the good laugh. The very reason president Ford did nothing was because of the political pressure from a bunch of yellow bellied hippy pot smoking war protesters. It would have been political suicide. He would have been treated the same way president Bush has been treated, he was a coward and people died. We left Vietnam too soon, and many people there were slaughtered as a result. Their blood is on the heads of every single war protester that ever slithered.

A similar thing happened in Somalia during Operation Gothic Serpent. Our troops went in harms way without the support of AC130 gunships, and heavy armor on the ground because then president Clinton did not want to draw the attention of the press, and reap the negative attention from his fellow anti-war protesters.

For the sake of argument, let's suppose we continued the VN war, that Ford sent us back in, and that we went back in force to stop the NVs. How many North & South Vietnamise and Americans would have died if we had continued fighting the war, how many died (slaughtered) after we left versus the number that died while we fought an unwinable war. Yes, I know you think the war was winable, so humor me on that point, and do the body count math.

 

[Ecomike]

Navy, because Iran has lots of boats....and if we'd pull ours out of the Persian Gulf (or Arabian Gulf as the towel-heads insist on calling it), they'd create havoc on everyone else's oil platforms, ships and the like....

But...

I'd be worried that Iran has an itchy trigger finger with its surface launched missiles....

I'd also be pissed that Iran would probably hit Iraq's newly US-built oil infrastructure....taking about 2.9 million barrels of oil off of the market....

overnight, oil would be up over $200/barrel...and it would be 50 years before we could repair the damage done by Iran's atomic weapons....

I am pretty sure the Middle East will be glowing in the dark before we pulled our Navy out of the Persian Gulf, no matter who won the next election. So I don't see the Iraq lack of a Navy as an issue. The rest of what you said is the real reason we are in Iraq, OIL! Always has been!