Hopefully History will not repeat itself 24 years later.

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Mikem

Mikem

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The last time the U.S. and Iran had a shooting war against each other over the Strait of Hormuz was in April 1988. The carrier task force involved was the USS Enterprise. The operation was called Praying Mantis. It started over a Iranian mine hitting the USS Roberts a missile frigate. Before it was over the Iranians lost one frigate sunk, one gunboat sunk, three or four speedboats sunk, one frigate damaged along with a couple of oil platforms severly damaged. The U.S. lost a Cobre Helicopter with two Marines killed.

My son is on the USS Enterprise 24 years later and tensions are even higher now then back then. The ship is going on its 23rd and last deployment since being commisioned. It's going to the Persian Gulf. I hope and pray that both sides have cooler heads before it gets there about the same time in 2012 as it did in 1988.
 
I feel for you Mike, and pray that your son will finish that tour with no trouble. My own daughter just went through that, having made several tours through the middle east on the USS Nimitz. Her ship went into dry dock a few months ago and she was able to stay in the states so far, we're hoping it stays that way.

The one single biggest issue I have with our present government is that they just don't get it - we do not want our troops in conflict over there anymore! It does no good to make a big show out of pulling them out of Iraq only to move them to Afghanistan or elsewhere in the gulf region. Bring them home means bring them home.
 
Puff Daddy":1dobm3n8 said:
.............The one single biggest issue I have with our present government is that they just don't get it - we do not want our troops in conflict over there anymore! It does no good to make a big show out of pulling them out of Iraq only to move them to Afghanistan or elsewhere in the gulf region. Bring them home means bring them home.
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I agree completely and could have not said it better.
 
I was in a local smoking lounge last week and the topic of discussion was the US/Iranian conflict, and a managerial type, who stays very fit although small of stature, voiced the remark that the US was challenging Iran "because we're the United States," and tacitly, that no one can withstand us (except the Vietnamese); further I think there was a certain amount of swagger and machismo in his statement, that the US will do what it likes.

This swagger has no place in our military thinking. It belongs to the 19th and the early to middle 20th centuries. Our Manifest Destiny has been made Unmanifest by history.

When Nelson Mandela was the newly-elected South African President, he declared there would be no wholesale retribution for members of the South African Police who had perpetrated the many, many ghastly horrors on Africans during apartheid. Instead, if they openly told the truth about what they had done and had been acting under orders, they were set free. Mandela said if you hurt someone, you hurt everyone, including yourself.

It is this kind of thinking that we should be bringing to the Middle East.
 
I'm not going to comment on what we should and shouldn't be doing...

But I will say this.. 24 years ago the Iranians didn't have a missle that the US Military admits it has no defense against.
might end up being more than a helicopter if it comes to it this time.
 
I have two young sons of my own, Mike, and I fear our leaders have made the world a more perilous place for them to survive and prosper. I hope your children and mine live to ripe old ages so they can tell their children stories about the good old days of their youth, rather than have to explain to them how our generation mortgaged their futures.

Prayers and best wishes for you and your son, brother, and for the future of our country, as well.

JT
 
What most Americans don't understand is there is no live and let live with these people they see us as weak and will continue to be a pain in our side. I have served two tours in Iraq in the army and work in Iraq now. the people of Iraq and Iran know only who is the strongest, if you dont stand up to them they will never back down. unlike americans who love everyone but the military who serves them the people of Iraq and Iran dont like any of us and they want nothing more than to wipe us off the face of the earth the sad truth of this is we are helping them do it most of the time. I never say anything but this has been building up to a point where I must. our enemy will never stop hiting us or playing with us to come here or go there knowing it cost more and more money and when we do get to a area they know we wont do a damn thing but make a big show and waite for some ass clown to read a letter on TV saying how upset we are and next time we will do this and that, but next time never come. We as the american will put soldiers /marines in jail for pissing on a dead enemy who had been trying to kill them and who did kill their friend next to him. Our enemy will cut you up burn your body and hang you over a bridge and they will be looked at as heros. I say if you want really want your sons and daughters to live in a free world and your grand chrildren to grow up without the treat of fighting these enemies we have than let our military do its job and finish it now.
 
Be that as it may, Mr. [or, insert military rank] Hester, we never had any business there to begin with. And we don't now, either.

Every story has two sides -- not just one. This is the other side :

http://www.examiner.com/nonpartisan-in-national/if-the-us-was-attacked-by-a-criminal-empire-analogy-to-confront-us-iran-history

The facts involved are not in serious dispute.

To be clear on this, I do support you personally, because you are an American serviceman, and I'm an American. But I don't believe that anyone with the information necessary to understand your situation there and a conscience can support the fact that you are there at all.

Since people in the military tend to hear each other better than they do civilians, I'm offering you the view of the big picture as it was painted (in a 1933 speech) by Maj. General Smedley Butler, USMC. (His "credentials, if you like : the Marine Corps Brevet Medal and two Congressional Medals of Honor for actions in two different engagements) :

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4377.htm

Respectfully,

:face:

 
Fact one we are here regardless if we should have been here or not we are indeed here. The reason we didnt have trouble with Iran for as long as we did 25 years Mr Reagan told them to stop puting mines in the Gulf or we will sink their navy they didn't we did, a show of force they respect power and everything else is weak. If our father thought this way in WW2 we would not be speaking english now. If you want the war to end as I do for I have faught it and lost men under me as well as friends who will never see their children grow, stop being the love your enemy campaine and let us finish it as our father did in wars past. Know this if we dont finish it now your children and your grand children we be fightng them.
 
IMHO our problems are and continue to be that our politicians play both sides(yes, even the sainted Mr. Reagan) by saying one thing to the world but doing something different behind closed doors...and our soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen pay the ultimate price...

But what does it matter to them? As long as the right people are making tons of money all is well....
 
If you treated a dog or a horse the way the US has treated the Islamic countries in the Middle East, it would be every bit as "vicious" toward us as what you're describing their people as being. So where does the responsibility for that lie ?

IMHO, George Washington's Farewell Address sums the whole matter up.

When you abandon your principles, you pay the price.

And for the benefit of whom ? Or of what ?

:face:
 
If what you mean by "Radical Islam" is the late 19th-Century Wahabbi movement and similar "fundamentalist" abandonments of the fundamentals of Islamic law and civilisation concocted and spread with the assistance of the British Foreign Office, then you are correct. From your location and mindset, I expect you're coming from its American analogue, courtesy of Cyrus Schofield.

People in the business of creating wars to profit from are very good at coming up with plausible-sounding pretexts (at the time) for getting people to play "Let's You and Him Fight." And every one of them, in retrospect, has been a web of outright, satanic lies.

Like the one you are telling when you accuse Iran of wanting to do what you want the US to do even more of -- rule the world.

For the benefit of somebody else.

Shame.

:face:
 
I edit my posts because I'm an ADD Hyperfocused Dyslexic -- not a know-it-all. It takes seeing six or seven trial versions sometimes to get them revised into what I'm trying to say without tangents running off here and there and the grammar needing cleaned up. I don't "see" things until afterward sometimes. Too "disorganised" and lost in details.

You will find, if you read deeply enough into the background, that the "Fundamentalist Islam" you are trying to paint the Islamic people with goes through the last 75 years of history hand-in-hand with the British Foreign Office, the Arab-American Oil Company's monopoly of Arabian oil via the House of Saud, the CIA's creation of the Taliban, and just about every other force in the region designed to unsettle it and plunder its resources.

Civilized Iranians, Afghanis and Iraqis (and there are quite a few of them) regard the people running their countries the way we would if snake-handler "Christians" were running this country. And with equal justice.

Bottom line fact : the people you accuse of wanting to rule us have no capacity to do so, no interest in doing so, and more than enough problems of their own that we're creating for them.

:face:
 
A centuries-old battle between who ?

They didn't like the Crusaders taking Constantinople/Istambul, and we didn't like the Ottomans trying to take Vienna.

Except for blatant stuff like that, we've gotten along forever.

:face:

 
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