Reply #61: From people I know over there. From a variety of military sources in our and other

[MADem]

governments.

You do realize the Iranians are RATIONING gasoline? They're having trouble making their own government payroll and pensions schemes? The roads are more pothole than macadam in many places?

The infrastructure is falling apart. They aren't RICH, and their oil, because of their crappy equipment and the habit of their mullahs of skimming off the top for the benefit of their own families, isn't allowing them to get ahead at all. Corruption now is worse than it was under Shah...! And they aren't doing as well, getting all that great FMS money and grants like they used to get--they're on their own and they can't balance the checkbook.

Their military, with their shitty fake North Korean rockets, and their fake, plastered over old US shah-era jets that they call "home grown," is about as ready as the "OOOOOOOH, SCARY!!!!" Saddam Army was. Remember how tough they were supposed to be? It wasn't the 'cakewalk' that was the problem--it was the AFTER-CAKEWALK, with the IEDs, that killed so many of our young people.

Same thing would happen in Iran if we tried to pull anything there, which is why we won't.

Read between the lines of this piece, which is planted to suggest that there is more THERE there than there actually is there: http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=3&id=3528

It's not the Army that's the problem, see? Anyone who went into Iran would meet the full force and fury of the civilian population and a home-grown insurgency that would mandate twenty two hour curfews. The fact remains, though, that they'd get their clocks cleaned if they even thought about any adventurism. They'd get the Osirik treatment times a hundred, or a thousand, if they even entertained the notion of causing Israel any trouble.