Via Drum, Admiral Mike Mullen:
Mullen said the U.S. government will not take any option off the table in responding to the Iranian threat. But speaking to reporters today, Mullen repeatedly made clear that he preferred dealing with the problem through diplomatic or financial pressure rather than a military strike.
Still, Mullen said the military had plans to respond to a variety of potential incidents involving Iran….”I have reserve capability in our Air Force and Navy,” Mullen said. “It would be a mistake to think we are out of combat capability.”
That’s great. America can take all comers, as long as they only challenge us in the air or more than 200 km from shore (those sunburn antiship missiles are a bitch). That’s barely any different from our capability before George H.W.’s idiot kid broke the Army, as long as you don’t count fighting on land. Now we just wait for al Qaeda to field a blue water Navy.
As far as Iran goes, the idea that “all options are on the table” is transparently stupid. Threatening Persia with ground forces is plainly not on the table. In fact pretty much nothing is on the table other than strategic bombing, or strategic bombing plus first use of nukes. Otherwise, uh…we could knock a bunch of satellites out of orbit and hope that some of them fall on Iran. I guess there’s always the option of paying exile groups to assassinate Khamenei with an exploding cigar Koran. I’d recommend stronger sanctions but let’s face it, the world is a bit short of light sweet crude at the moment, Russia has no compunctions about thumbing their nose at our complaints (Putin actually seems enjoy it), and Russia has nukes. Plus our 150k troops in Iraq become hostages whenever the bombs start to fall (compare our resupply/evac routes with Shiite turf some time).
It would be nice if guys like Mullen just admitted that “the table” doesn’t have much on it except bad options and worse, and and his boss has no-one but himself to blame.
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Speaking of great things that should happen but won’t, it would be spiff for you guys to buy me a Wii and successfully lobby Nintendo to publish Wii Squash already. That game would effing rock.