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When it comes to a “traditional world war”. Cleita, I’ll ignore thet fact that just last week I argued here that WWIII has already commenced :) (a new kind of world war, Radical Islam versus modern, Westerned societies), and stick to the topic at hand, where I think you were asking about the possibility of major confrontations involving sovereign nations. I think this only happens if a nuclear weapon is used against Israel. This would undoubtedly be linked to Iran, and I think that in the wake of such an attack Israeli government would feel it had no choice but to retalilate directly againsts Iran (Or if the Israel government/military command and control was completely wiped out, I think the US would hit retaliate directly against Iran—if a Rep President were in power. But in that case, our conventional weapons arsenal in so vast, we could sufficiently flatten Iranian power centers without resorting to nukes). But let me step back a moment. This in not a scenario that will happen during the current conflict. It only becomes a realistic possibility some years down the road, when Iran will likely have developed an arsenal of multiple nuclear weapons and other WMD. Even then I don’t see it happening: Iran seems to love funneling weapons to Hezbo, but I don’t think they’d give them a suitcase nuke. That would be too easy for Israel to blame on them. I DO think they would pass along a biological WMD however. That kind of disaster could take weeks to play out, and in the resulting panic and chaos it would be harder to pin on Iran, or to blame any government in particular. But even though I think the Iranians are too ‘shrewd’ to pass along an actual nuclear weapon to Hezbo, you never know, they might. Then, well, I’ll resume my narrative from above, set a dozen or more years in the future: Israel—which I think is believed to have in excess of 440 nuclear devices—would respond with devastating force against Tehran and any other population centers that were believed to be seats of power for the ruling Mullahs and/or the more secular official government office holders. Contrary to some of the rhetoric I see thrown around here, I do not think Israel is the kind of country that would try to wipe out Iran indiscriminantly. They have a plan on the books already, have to doubt. But while it would be brutal, it would not be a total annihilation. In other words, it would not be anywhere near as devastating as the reverse would be true if Hezbollah or Iran’s President had 440 nukes at their disposal to use on Israel. But what happens next? Would Russia/China dare step in? I doubt it, in part for reasons illucidated by DireStrike. In an all-out military showdown, the US is currently capable of defeating either of them or both of them in combination. And this is not just due to nukes but to vastly superior conventional weapons and esppecially naval resources-STAGING ability. We could position multiple aircraft carrier battle groups off the shores of both countries that they lack the ability to counter.
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