- 1 September 2011
- 1 Comments
- Election 2012, Neo-Con Agenda, US-Iran War
With the ad nauseum invocations by American political figures that an Iran military option (or even “military solution”) is “on the table”, there has been an alarming lack of substantive discussion on what such an option would actually entail. Recently though, two pieces have provided some needed perspective on the consequences of going to war with Iran.
The first is a report by U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Leif Eckholm, who serves under Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen has gone on the record to say that the only military “option” that would end Iran’s nuclear program would be a ground invasion and occupation. Eckholm’s echoes this and says “the price of an invasion would be astronomical…” An Iran war, he says, may require 1.4 million troops, “nearly double the current end-strength of the active duty U.S. Army and Marines combined.”
He bases this on the one soldier to every 50 inhabitant ratio recommended by former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, noting that Iran has three times the population and four the landmass of Iraq. Shinseki’s advice was notoriously ignored and discredited by Donald Rumsfeld in the drive to invade Iraq. We’ve learned from the last decade what are the grave ramifications for discarding honest assessments just because they are inconvenient for Washington.
So, the forces required to wage a successful war against Iran are completely unrealistic. Unrealistic, that is, unless war advocates are willing to advocate a national military draft.