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Tell Me How This Ends

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Infanteer

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Found a neat article describing a "choose your own adventure" type game that helps illustrate a war in Iran.

http://tellmehowthisends.com/

Here's the article:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2012/10/19/how-i-tried-to-bomb-iran-into-the-stone-age-part-i/

The metrics are world oil price and costs.  How did you do?
 
Apparently, it takes 3 full carrier groups on constant rotation to enforce a no fly zone, Israel has no ability to defend itself, Iran has a limitless supply of ballistic missles to fire at Israel, the US has no ability to wipe the Iranian navy off the map... And many many other things that are left out. There are far too few options, and clicking through and choosing different paths all lead to pretty much the exact same thing.

Its obvious the author is very against an attack on Iran, and it shows.
 
I didn't like it. I had no 'first strike nuclear option or the ability to shoot my advisers who suggested the war wasn't going well or that we should withdraw.
 
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC (http://www.godaddy.com)
  Domain Name: TELLMEHOWTHISENDS.COM

  Registrant:
  Truman National Security Project
 
I truly hope we dont attack Iran, I honestly & truly hope we dont.  Is there a thread on this topic already??  I did a quick search, but the server was busy and the search function was disabled.

I know anybody here who has ever visited Iran probably feels the same way.  Completely and totally different than how CNN portrays it.
 
Iran needs to have its nuclear facilities neutralized. For the good of the region. If they are able to produce a nuclear warhead  then no doubt they will strike Israel.
 
I thought the "game" was interesting at first, but after going through all the choices, it's pretty clear it isn't "choices" presented to you.
 
tomahawk6 said:
Iran needs to have its nuclear facilities neutralized. For the good of the region. If they are able to produce a nuclear warhead  then no doubt they will strike Israel.

And Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ...
 
tomahawk6 said:
Iran needs to have its nuclear facilities neutralized. For the good of the region. If they are able to produce a nuclear warhead  then no doubt they will strike Israel.


If you want to effect real change in the region then an Iranian nuc may be the best of all catalysts: an Iranian nuclear strike against Israel will, not might, produce a response of such violence and horror that the peoples of the region - Arabs, Persians and Jews, alike - and of neighbouring regions will want to make and keep a comprehensive, honest, useful peace.
 
skyhigh10 said:
And Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ...

I detect sarcasm, yet ask the Kurdish villages that were wiped out if they feel whether the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction or not. 
 
Lets not forget, Israel isnt exactly innocent by ANY stretch of the imagination.  Not even close.

Yes, they are a strong US ally in the region.  Yes, they are a democracy.  Yes, they are the religious and spiritual birthplace of the Christian dominated west. 

But, they arent exactly the most benign country in the region by any stretch.  As someone who has been to Israel, and Iran - I felt a whole lot safer in Iran than I ever did in Israel.  (The Daily Show just had a segment where they sent their reporters to Iran to do some comical interviews - great footage and interaction with the locals, which - like in the show - was the total opposite of what the media had portrayed to me.)

The people were funny, laid back, easy going - and unlike us, they had great things to say about the west. 

Its funny.  They have every reason not to trust us, they have every reason to resent us - and yet many of them were just happily living there lives, and thought that most people in the west were "very nice people." 

Yet here is the Americans labelling them, just as they did Iraq, and a *huge national security threat* and *the country that might just start WW3!!*    What a bunch of BS.

Remember about 4yrs ago, during one of the spurts of *increased* fighting in the Gaza Strip??  Israel dropped WP rounds right in the middle of urban areas - you could even see it drifting between buildings like a cloud.  Not exactly respectable in the slightest.

Every country in the region has problems.  Some with stability, some with fanatical leadership, some with an entitlement complex, and some that are actually better off and are doing well given the part of the world they are in, i.e. Jordan.  Personally, Im glad the US basically told Israel to simmer on down a few weeks back - good call, Presidential Elections coming up or not.
 
Dig up the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs, referred to here, and the follow-on discussion, for some interesting reading sparked by Kenneth Waltz's article "Why Iran Should Get the Bomb."
 
Wargaming is a very interesting art, and like so many other things, can be affected by "starting conditions" and whatever limits and restrictions that you incorporate. There was an example prior to OIF where the commander of the Red Team took on the US Navy in the Gulf using navalized insurgent tactics; approaching task forces with swarms of zodiacs and light aircraft, and (if I remember correctly) laying mines and using whatever "regular" Iraqi capabilities that existed to strike during the confusion caused by the swarming attacks. He was apparently fired for his troubles.

Farther back in time, the IJN's wargameing of the battle of Midway correctly predicted the carriers were at risk, but when the "Red Team" representing the USN did sink the carriers, the game was simply reset and replayed without the IJN carriers being attacked. Sadly for the Japanese, resets were not offered on the Pacific Ocean during the real battle.

If all the decision trees in this game lead to Iranian victory or frustrate any possibility of the Western Alliance achieving victory (regardless of what you might think about this potential conflict, victory is always possible if one side should devote enough time, energy and resources to the project) then this is a propaganda project on the order of the 2011 CBC election "quiz" which pointed out that regardless of your position on campaign issues, you were actually a Liberal supporter.

Going a bit deeper, since war is about achieving political objectives, victory against the Iranian theocracy could be achieved at a low cost if the right political objectives are chosen and the proper risk management is in place to "win the peace" or at least contain the fallout. A "headshot" to decapitate the leadership and eliminate Iran as an organized State and potential hegemonic power is one of these options, the risk managment is to make sure whatever regime(s) replaces the theocracy is not able to continue the nuclear program.
 
CBH99 said:
Lets not forget, Israel isnt exactly innocent by ANY stretch of the imagination.  Not even close.

Yes, they are a strong US ally in the region.  Yes, they are a democracy.  Yes, they are the religious and spiritual birthplace of the Christian dominated west. 

But, they arent exactly the most benign country in the region by any stretch.  As someone who has been to Israel, and Iran - I felt a whole lot safer in Iran than I ever did in Israel.  (The Daily Show just had a segment where they sent their reporters to Iran to do some comical interviews - great footage and interaction with the locals, which - like in the show - was the total opposite of what the media had portrayed to me.)

The people were funny, laid back, easy going - and unlike us, they had great things to say about the west. 

Its funny.  They have every reason not to trust us, they have every reason to resent us - and yet many of them were just happily living there lives, and thought that most people in the west were "very nice people." 

Yet here is the Americans labelling them, just as they did Iraq, and a *huge national security threat* and *the country that might just start WW3!!*    What a bunch of BS.

Remember about 4yrs ago, during one of the spurts of *increased* fighting in the Gaza Strip??  Israel dropped WP rounds right in the middle of urban areas - you could even see it drifting between buildings like a cloud.  Not exactly respectable in the slightest.

Every country in the region has problems.  Some with stability, some with fanatical leadership, some with an entitlement complex, and some that are actually better off and are doing well given the part of the world they are in, i.e. Jordan.  Personally, Im glad the US basically told Israel to simmer on down a few weeks back - good call, Presidential Elections coming up or not.

Yes we must never forget that Israel is the greatest evil in the ME  ::)
Any thinking person differante between the Iranian government and people, it's pretty clear the people want peace, but the IRG and Supreme Council is suspect. They are not very nice people and have caused all sort of nasties in the region, not even counting their casual use of frontal attacks in the Iran-Iraq war. Israel is mere entertainment for them, the real show is the Sunni-Shia conflict and that is why they want nukes.
 
This reminded me of an interview I was listening to on NPR last month with Kenneth Pollack of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

Essentially the results always ended in both sides miscalculating and ending in mass military conflict.

Simulated War Between U.S.-Iran Has Grisly End

http://www.npr.org/2012/09/24/161706698/simulated-war-between-u-s-iran-has-grisly-end

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

There was another exercise in Washington last week that involved Iran, the U.S. and the impasse over the Iranian nuclear program. The Brookings Institution staged a war game. No real weapons were used, but teams playing the roles of U.S. and Iranian policymakers were presented with a hypothetical but not very far-fetched scenario, and the results were not encouraging. Kenneth Pollack is a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, and he ran this exercise and joins us. Good to see you again.

KENNETH POLLACK: Very good to be back.

SIEGEL: First, you're not identifying the people who took part in the game, but can you at least describe what kind of people they were?

POLLACK: Sure. On the American side, we brought together of about a dozen former very senior American officials, people who have actually occupied the roles in reality that they were asked to play in the game. On the Iranian side, it was a little bit different. We obviously don't have access to, honest to goodness, former Iranian policymakers. So what we had to do there was rely on Iranian-American and American experts on Iran, a number of whom had some experience in the U.S. government, but obviously somewhat different from our American team.

SIEGEL: They are presented with this scenario that you wrote, which included cyber attacks, assassinations of scientists, and it escalated from there. When you wrote all of this, did you write it in a way that you thought it was at least possible that diplomacy might prevail over threats of war?

POLLACK: Absolutely. The idea was to test some basic hypotheses about where the United States and Iran might be going. And we allowed for the scenario to move in any of several dozen different directions, some of which were entirely pacific, some were entirely bellicose and others that were a mix of the two. And some of the interesting things that came out of the game was that there were some key moments were if one team or the other had done something slightly differently, according to the other team, they would've had a peaceful response instead of what actually happened.

SIEGEL: So take us back to a moment last week during this game, you as the facilitator of the entire exercise and watching it. What's a moment when you can see the slippery slope has just gotten a lot more slippery?

POLLACK: One of the most remarkable moments for me, one of the moments where I felt like, boy, this game is now headed irretrievably into war, was when the Iranians are debating what to do after the American initial move. The game starts with a terrorist attack, an Irani terrorist attack, that get's too out of hand, too big. The United States decides to respond, and one of the things the United States decides to do is to hit a remote Irani Revolutionary Guards' facility. And the Americans were hoping that the Iranians would see this as a minimal American response.

SIEGEL: It was the least they would do, yeah.

POLLACK: Exactly. Literally the least the American people would accept. The Iranian saw it as the Americans crossing a red line. And the Iranian team also decided that having repeatedly said that if the United States hits Iran, we will close the Strait of Hormuz, they felt compelled to then do something in the Strait of Hormuz. Now according to the American team, if the Iranians had done anything else - and the Iranian team came up with a series of responses - everything else they did would've produced a peaceful American response thereafter. But the Iranian moves in the Strait of Hormuz were what pushed the Americans higher up on the escalation ladder.

SIEGEL: Well, was the end of the game, I mean, we're talking about the last scene of "Dr. Strangelove?" I mean, was the world about to be incinerated? How bad was the end of it all?

POLLACK: The end of the game - and, of course, the end of the game was a - it's always a bad place to stop, was pretty bad. The Americans were about to launch a massive military operation against Iran. The only question was whether it was obliterating all of Iran's coastal defenses, air defenses, surface-to-air missile batteries, navy, et cetera, or whether it was going to be all that and the Iranian nuclear program. And the Iran team had already thought this through and decided that if that was what the United States is going to do, they were going to fight on in their words forever.

And so the game ends with the first big American military moves. And it's unfortunate because, of course, the real problems with a war with Iran are not that first big American moves, they're what follows. They're how do you turn off a war with Iran? How do you bring it to a close? How do you stop them?

SIEGEL: Ken Pollack, thank you very much for talking with us.

POLLACK: Thanks so much for having me back.

SIEGEL: Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, ran the war game we've been hearing about at Brookings last week.
 
I don't like it, the choices are too limited, and the play through I did never had a 'pull back' option, nor any real inter-state diplomacy.
 
Shadowolf said:
I detect sarcasm, yet ask the Kurdish villages that were wiped out if they feel whether the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction or not.

Sure. The minute you ask the 100,000+ Iraqis who were turned into salsa if they support another US Led Invasion. We can play these games all day. I am not in the business of declaring what is right and wrong when it comes to foreign policy, though common sense tells me an preemptive strike on Iran would affect every single individual on this planet. 

Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Afghanistan. So before you start playing the war drum maybe visit wikipedia or something (to start) ?  :salute:  John Stewart did a good piece when he sent some of his workers to Iran to document how bloodthirsty and demonic these people are....  (sarcasm) 
 
Colin P said:
....the real show is the Sunni-Shia conflict and that is why they want nukes.

+1

The Gulf States are the ones that need to worry, not Israel.
 
Shadowolf said:
I detect sarcasm, yet ask the Kurdish villages that were wiped out if they feel whether the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction or not.

No one ever disputed that they had them in the past.

They had long since gotten rid of them by 2003 when the Big Lie to justify that patently useless war was concocted. Interesting side effect of invading Iraq was making Iran much more influential in the region, including in Iraq.
 
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