“You never roll out a new product in August”

I think I liked it better when September meant new models from the car manufacturers and new TV schedules.

Informed Comment Global Affairs: Post Labor Day Product Rollout: War with Iran (Cross-posted at DailyKos)!:

Today I received a message from a friend who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient. According to this report, as in 2002, the rollout will start after Labor Day, with a big kickoff on September 11. My friend had spoken to someone in one of the leading neo-conservative institutions. He summarized what he was told this way:

They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this–they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

Of course I cannot verify this report. But besides all the other pieces of information about this circulating, I heard last week from a former U.S. government contractor. According to this friend, someone in the Department of Defense called, asking for cost estimates for a model for reconstruction in Asia. The former contractor finally concluded that the model was intended for Iran. This anecdote is also inconclusive, but it is consistent with the depth of planning that went into the reconstruction effort in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Remember the old playground taunt “you and whose Army?” It’s apropos here. With the current level of force unsustainable past April 2008, where will the forces to attack Iran come from? And Iran is not Iraq. It is not sanction-starved or in any way as weak as Iraq was. By all accounts, not only will it be able to fight back effectively, it will also be able to sow quite a bit of havoc in the region. And any disruption to the oil supplies needed by India and China will be received very poorly.

Are these people really as stupid as all that? I guess we won’t have long to find out and I hope the information circulating around this is 100% wrong.

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