Navy Requesting More Fuel for Persian Gulf Forces

With the situation in Iraq stabilizing, this report raises the possibility of a stronger stance with Iran in the not-too-distant future:

LONDON, Nov 23 (Reuters) - The U.S. military has stepped up chartering of tankers and requests for extra fuel in the U.S. Central Command area, which includes the Gulf, shipping and oil industry sources say.

A Gulf oil industry source said the charters suggested there would be high naval activity, possibly including a demonstration to Iran that the U.S. Navy will protect the Strait of Hormuz oil shipping route during tensions over Tehran's nuclear programme.

The U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command (MSC) has tendered for four tankers in November to move at least one million barrels of jet and ship fuel between Gulf ports, from Asia to the Gulf and to the Diego Garcia base, tenders seen by Reuters show.

It usually tenders for one or two tankers a month to supply Gulf operations, which include missions in Iraq.

The MSC, asked for comment, confirmed the tenders and said there was nothing abnormal about current requirements in the Gulf, where it has a large military presence and which is home to the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet.

A fifth hire request was recently cancelled, it said.

Fuels specified to be moved between Gulf ports include JP5, high flashpoint jet fuel, used to power F18 fighters aboard aircraft carriers.

That same "Gulf source" had some idea of why they are calling for more fuel, and given that he's said to have been in the oil business quite some time, I tend to think his thoughts are at least worth considering:

One of the largest commercial tanker hires is on a time-charter basis, the length of time a ship is sought, stipulating a period of 90 days to carry a range of fuels between locations in the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

The time charter, which begins in early December and allows for multiple journeys in Gulf waters, is to carry a minimum of 310,000 barrels of jet and marine fuel, some of it JP5.

"What's most interesting is the time-charter in the Gulf. It's a big ship and here we have a commitment for a lot of movement of fuels, backwards and forwards down to the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman," the Gulf source said.

"This confirms there is going to be a lot of activity, possibly a serious demonstration to Iran that the military means to protect the Hormuz Strait," he said.

He pointed out that Saudi Arabia had already promised U.S. forces long-term fuel supplies this year, known as term tenders.

In February, oil industry sources told Reuters Riyadh had raised the amount of jet fuel earmarked for the military from 1.5 million barrels last year to close to eight million in 2007.

So, don't be surprised if we see military maneuvers in the next 90 days or so aimed at showing the Iranians how easily we can reach them, or anything between that and a full-scale invasion.

And don't be surprised if the lefties howl bloody murder if and when it happens.

Get Ready for the Blood For Oil Meme to Rise Again

Looks like lefties will have to switch memes again... which shouldn't be hard for them, as they have no core beliefs except hatred of George W. Bush.

First, the outgoing meme:

BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq's government, seeking protection against foreign threats and internal coups, will offer the U.S. a long-term troop presence in Iraq in return for U.S. security guarantees as part of a strategic partnership, two Iraqi officials said Monday.

There goes the "Iraqis don't want us there" meme down the tubes. If the democratically elected and sovereign government asks us to stay, how can anyone say with a straight face that they don't want us there?

However, there's another one coming up... the old, familiar, tired, "blood for oil" meme:

The two senior Iraqi officials said Iraqi authorities had discussed the broad outlines of the proposal with U.S. military and diplomatic representatives. The Americans appeared generally favorable subject to negotiations on the details, which include preferential treatment for American investments, according to the Iraqi officials involved in the discussions.

The two Iraqi officials, who are from two different political parties, spoke on condition of anonymity because the subject is sensitive. Members of parliament were briefed on the plan during a three-hour closed-door meeting Sunday, during which lawmakers loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr objected to the formula.

Preferential treatment for U.S. investors could provide a huge windfall if Iraq can achieve enough stability to exploit its vast oil resources. Such a deal would also enable the United States to maintain leverage against Iranian expansion at a time of growing fears about Tehran's nuclear aspirations.

So get ready for the great hue and cry that it was all about oil... nevermind that this is just an offer, not a firm deal, and that it is a free and democratically elected Iraqi government that is making the offer with the only valuable resource it has to bargain with. I mean, what else are they going to offer the US for our continued troop presence? Sand?

Giving Thanks

I am thankful that people like Chris Hedges are writing for The Nation, and not running it (the USA as a nation, not the magazine):

I will not pay my income tax if we go to war with Iran. I realize this is a desperate and perhaps futile gesture. But an attack on Iran—which appears increasingly likely before the coming presidential election—will unleash a regional conflict of catastrophic proportions. This war, and especially Iranian retaliatory strikes on American targets, will be used to silence domestic dissent and abolish what is left of our civil liberties. It will solidify the slow-motion coup d'etat that has been under way since the 9/11 attacks. It could mean the death of the Republic.
...
I will put the taxes I owe in an escrow account. I will go to court to challenge the legality of the war. Maybe a courageous judge will rule that the Constitution has been usurped and the government is guilty of what the postwar Nuremberg tribunal defined as a criminal war of aggression. Maybe not. I do not know. But I do know this: I have friends in Tehran, Gaza, Beirut, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Cairo. They will endure far greater suffering and deprivation. I want to be able, once the slaughter is over, to at least earn the right to ask for their forgiveness.

And thank God they have the arrogance to write things like that for public consumption, so that we can see what kind of internal enemies we face.

God bless you all... even the lefties... even you, Mr. Troll, and you know who you are (if you write a kind response to this, it might actually get approved).

Saddam's Iranian Bluff

It sometimes happens that one small piece of information can help a lot of other things make sense. Thus it is with this revelation:

Ever since American forces invaded, overran and occupied Iraq in 2003, and discovered no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the great lingering question about the war has been why Saddam Hussein would spend an entire decade acting as though he possessed WMDs when he didn’t. Since the ceasefire agreement he’d signed in 1991, in order to remain in power after the first Gulf War, obligated him to get rid of them, why would Saddam intentionally endure crippling United Nations sanctions as he jerked around, and finally ejected, weapons inspectors? Why wouldn’t he just come clean if he had nothing to hide?

The answer, according Ronald Kessler in his new book, The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack, is that Saddam ultimately feared United Nations actions less than he feared an attack from Iran . . . which, he calculated, would be much more likely if the leaders of Iran knew he had no WMDs. Kessler based his conclusions on information obtained by an Arabic-speaking FBI agent named George Piro who debriefed and befriended Saddam after the dictator’s capture in Iraq, during his months of captivity before his eventual execution.

In retrospect, Saddam’s calculus looks altogether logical. He’d fought a brutal stalemated war against Iran in the 1980s and viciously persecuted Iraq’s Shiite majority out of fear they might align themselves with their Shiite neighbor. More alarming still, from Saddam’s standpoint, was the fact that his own military had been decimated by the 1991 conflict with the American led coalition. If Iran did attack, he had no chance in a conventional war.

His last option was a bluff: Since he once possessed WMDs, and the entire world knew it, he pretended he still did. He knew it would antagonize America, as well as the rest of the U.N. Security Council, but he figured that the threat of an American invasion to enforce the provisions of the 1991 ceasefire was less dire than the threat of an Iranian invasion to crush a bitter enemy and take control of Iraq’s oil resources. According to Kessler, “Saddam said that if America thought that he had WMDs, then of course Iran would, and this would fulfill his goal of making sure that Iran did not want to attack Iraq.”

What Saddam never counted on, of course, was September 11, 2001. Kessler’s book should put to rest, once and for all, the notion that Saddam was somehow involved in Osama bin Laden’s plot. The 9/11 attacks were Saddam’s worst nightmare because they changed the risk equation for the United States. Suddenly, the prospect of Saddam hiding WMDs went from being an ongoing nuisance to a mortal dread. What was to stop him from handing them off to al Qaeda?

President Bush decided the risk was intolerable — and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

So now it all makes sense. All the evidence for Saddam's WMDs was indeed cooked up--by Saddam himself, in a desperate gamble to keep Iran at bay. It must be admitted, he succeeded in that. However, in the long run, his strategy was a dismal failure, since it brought the attention of a nation whose armed forces he could not hope to beat--namely, the USA. In attempting to forestall invasion by one nation, he invited invasion by another. Of course, he's now paid for that mistake with his life.

However, this is good ammunition against the Bush-lied-people-died meme. It would be better if it were reworded to Saddam-lied-Saddam-died.

Frenchmen I Can Agree With

This is just the sort of thing I was hoping for from new French President Nicolas Sarkozy:

Ahmadinejad at Columbia provided the entertainment, but Sarkozy at the U.N. provided the substance. On the largest possible stage — the U.N. General Assembly — President Nicolas Sarkozy put Iran on notice. His predecessor, Jacques Chirac, had said that France could live with an Iranian nuclear bomb. Sarkozy said that France cannot. He declared Iran’s nuclear ambitions “an unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world.”

His foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, had earlier said that the world faces two choices — successful diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program or war. And Sarkozy himself has no great hopes for the Security Council, where China and Russia are blocking any effective action against Iran. He does hope to get the European Union to join the U.S. in imposing serious sanctions.

“Weakness and renunciation do not lead to peace,” he warned. “They lead to war.” This warning about appeasement was intended particularly for Germany, which for commercial reasons has been resisting U.S. pressure to support effective sanctions.

Some of us have learned from the French attempt at appeasement of Hitler's Germany in the 1930s; it appears that Germany itself may not have learned anything, or forgotten what they learned. It also seems that our native lefties haven't quite comprehended the lessons of French appeasement either.

Could Iran Fall from Within?

Some interesting speculation in NRO. It starts out with:

President Bush is annoyed that Afghan President Karzai and Iraqi President Maliki are both speaking about Iran in words reserved for an ally, rather than the main engine driving the terror wars in their countries. But if you look at the world through their eyes, it is easy enough to understand. They fear that the Americans will soon leave, and the Iranians will still be there. They know that Iran is a mortal threat, and they are now making a down payment on the insurance costs that are sure to come if the Democrats in Washington have their way. For extras, Maliki has certainly noticed that the United States is paying off the Middle Eastern Sunnis, hoping that the Saudis, Jordanians, and Gulf States will manage to contain Iran in the future. This cannot be good news in Baghdad, where the Shiites are struggling to put together a government capable of managing the country’s myriad crises.

The real meat comes at the end, tho:

In reality — for what little it matters nowadays, either here or in the Middle East — we are winning the battle of Iraq. The percentage increase in Iranian activity, combined with a drop in the number of attacks, is another way of saying that al Qaeda is being destroyed for a second time, and the Iranians are scrambling to fill the void. But they are on the run, just as is al Qaeda, as you can tell by the back-and-forth shuttling of their factotum Moqtadah al Sadr, between Iran and Iraq. If their scheme was working in Iraq, he’d sit still. He’s scrambling because they’re in trouble.

They’re in trouble at home, too. Indeed, things are so bad that the government itself has open fissures, the latest caused by the resignation of the minister of industry and mines, and by the public testimony of the minister of welfare:

The welfare minister, Abdol-Reza Mesri, appeared at the Majlis social committee on Saturday and announced that about 9.2 million Iranians live below the absolute poverty line. About 10.5 percent of residents in urban and 11 percent of residents in rural areas live below the absolute poverty line. Nevertheless, Mr. Mesri insisted that indicators used in computing the poverty line must be changed. The minister’s persistent suggestion to abandon internationally recognized methods of computing the poverty line has been met with the reaction of experts and professionals.

In simple English, there is so much poverty in Iran that the minister wants to change the reporting requirements so that nobody can really know the full dimensions of the Iranian people’s misery. Even their current language (what is “the absolute poverty line” anyway?) is designed to mislead.

Iranians are not stupid people; they know they are ruled by tyrannical incompetents. Listen to the words of one Reza Zarabi, in the August 5 Jerusalem Post: “Iranians have become accustomed to dictators, yet an incompetent despot that bases his economic policies on the future benevolence of the coming Islamic Messiah is another thing altogether...It is quite remarkable for such economic damage and global ridicule to be heaped upon a nation in (so) short a time. Yet the policies of the current Iranian administration have left nothing for the imagination.”

I ask you, is this not a perfect description of a revolutionary situation? And you reply: So why aren’t we doing anything about it? Which, I think, is precisely the question our military leaders in Iraq, and the people of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, are aiming at Washington.

Let us hope that Washington starts putting pressure... gentle, and plausibly deniable pressure, perhaps, but pressure... on Iran.

Lieberman: Iran is a Danger We Must Face

My favorite former Democrat is at it again, watching the Middle East like the hawk that he is and observing danger signs the Dhimmicrats would rather ignore:

According to Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, the Iranian government has been using the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah to train and organize Iraqi extremists, who are responsible in turn for the murder of American service members.

Gen. Bergner also revealed that the Quds Force--a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps whose mission is to finance, arm and equip foreign Islamist terrorist movements--has taken groups of up to 60 Iraqi insurgents at a time and brought them to three camps near Tehran, where they have received instruction in the use of mortars, rockets, improvised explosive devices and other deadly tools of guerrilla warfare that they use against our troops. Iran has also funded its Iraqi proxies generously, to the tune of $3 million a month.

This is the sort of thing that needs to be dealt with quickly and firmly. Mr. Lieberman explains how he would go about it:

America now has a solemn responsibility to utilize the instruments of our national power to convince Tehran to change its behavior, including the immediate cessation of its training and equipping extremists who are killing our troops.

Most of this work must be done by our diplomats, military and intelligence operatives in the field. But Iran's increasingly brazen behavior also presents a test of our political leadership here at home. When Congress reconvenes next week, all of us who are privileged to serve there should set aside whatever partisan or ideological differences divide us to send a clear, strong and unified message to Tehran that it must stop everything it is doing to bring about the death of American service members in Iraq.

The problem is, members of the Party of the Donkey, which, you will remember, found Lieberman not lefty enough for them, aren't interested in stopping the deaths of American war fighters. They believe that the more body bags that pile up, the easier it will be for them to force us out of Iraq, pleasing their rabid anti-war supporters.

In short, we cannot depend on Democrats to support stopping Iran. And thus, there's a very good possibility that we could be in real trouble sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Carving Turkeys

In my introduction a couple of days ago, mentioned I was a retired Navy guy. Well, most of my career, about 19 years of it, was spent around the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, the Navy fighter plane that was The Star of the movie Top Gun.

A few months ago, there was some reporting about Tomcats seized on their way to museums that were not properly demilitarized. Concern grew out of that incident that F-14 parts could make their way to someplace we don't want them to go. Namely, the only other country that has ever flown them - Iran.

An outgrowth of that has been an effort to prevent the inadvertent or illegal transfer of F-14 parts or whole airframes to a legitimate enemy of the United States. They're being cut up with a huge claw and shears.

A mechanical monster grabs the F-14 fighter jet and chews through one wing and then another, ripping off the Tomcat's appendages before moving onto its guts. Finally, all that's left is a pile of shredded rubble — like the scraps from a Thanksgiving turkey.

The Pentagon is paying a contractor at least $900,000 to destroy old F-14s, a jet affectionately nicknamed "the turkey," rather than sell the spares at the risk of their falling into the wrong hands, including Iran's.

Be sure to watch the video listed under related video titled Raw video: Watch an F-14 get demolished. (Seems to be no way to link directly to the video.) The video is sort of pixelated because it's been sped up.

It's quite fascinating to watch. But for a guy who spent so much of his life and career maintaining this jet, to have seen it fly and know it's marvelous capabilities, it's sad to see it cut up and discarded like an old wrecked car.

It was a sad day for me when the last Tomcat flew, ending an era of a great warplane.

If you can get beyond the notion that these are simply machines, or, as Marshall “War Dog” Lefavor put it:

The uninitiated non-believers think an airplane is a collection of moving parts and miles of wiring.

We know better

I won't go on and on about this jet, 'cuz this is primarily a political blog. If you're an aviation buff or just like the Tomcat, lots of good stories and pictures at Instapinch. And thanks for humoring an old Tomcat Tweaker.

Update July 3, 2007 - Instapinch has more to say on this subject, and lots of pics.

The UN has Jumped the Shark

The UN has finally jumped the shark and, thus, descended into total absurdity.

On April 9, 2007 there was a United Nations believe-it-or-not moment extraordinaire. At the same time that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad declared his country was now capable of industrial-scale uranium enrichment, the U.N. reelected Iran as a vice chairman of the U.N. Disarmament Commission.

Anyone still believing that the UN is a credible organization probably also believes that Elvis is still alive, that OJ is innocent, and that Algore is the true President of the United States.

(For those not familiar with "jumping the shark," see this article.)

French Aiding Iran in Developing Nukes

Once again, France has shown that it prefers making money to stopping rogue nations from arming themselves.

WESTERN GOVERNMENTS have been accused of "stunning hypocrisy" after it was revealed that Iran has a 10% stake in the world's largest uranium enrichment plant in France.

All the time that Britain, France and the US have been pressing the Iranian government to cease enriching uranium, the Islamic republic has been reaping multimillion pound dividends from its shareholding in Eurodif, an international enrichment plant at Pierrelatte in southern France.

Because of its involvement, Iran has also been learning more about the latest enrichment technology. It claims that it only wants to enrich uranium to improve its performance as a fuel in nuclear power stations, but Western nations are worried that it will be used to make nuclear bombs.

(blue emphasis added)

Reminds one of French involvement in Saddam's Iraq, doesn't it?

The French are not our allies. This report should be ample proof of that.

Hat Tip: Little Green Footballs.

Don't Bomb Iran

One of my very favorite historians, Victor Davis Hanson, makes an interesting point about the recently-concluded Iranian Hostage Situation (March-April 2007 edition):

What should we make of the Iranians’ behavior?

Namely that the country’s leadership is in deep political trouble. The Iranian government is desperate to provoke the West to win back friends in the Islamic world, and to quell growing unrest at home. Subsidizing food and gas, providing billions for terrorists and building nukes all cost money at a time when the state-run Iranian economy is in shambles.

Because of incompetence in their oil industry, the Iranian mullahs have achieved the impossible: Despite having among the world’s largest petroleum reserves, their production is shrinking and they have managed to earn increasingly less petrodollars even as the world price has soared.

While the Iranian theocrats understand that the entire world, including many of their own citizens, is turning against them, they also know that this could change if a Western nation would just attack them. Their strategy seems to be to find a way to provoke someone to drop a few bombs on them, on the naive assumption that such an assault would be of limited duration and damage. Such an attack, they may figure, would earn them sympathy in much of the world.

So, if Iran wants it so badly, is it really a good idea to give it to them?