- WASHINGTON (UPI) -- Ripley's
Believe It Or Not! began in 1918 as a comic strip featuring unusual, hard-to-believe
facts from around the world. Today it is a website for a global community
that combs cyberspace for events so strange and unusual that it is often
hard to believe they are taking place. These days, you don't have to go
further afield than Washington , D.C.
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- The neo-conservatives -- or neocons -- who gave
us the "cakewalk" prediction for Iraq before the war are now
plugging "a walk in the park" in Iran -- i.e., a U.S. bombing
campaign to consign the mullahs' nuclear ambitions to oblivion, or at least
to retard the advent of an Iranian bomb for a few years, hoping that in
the interim good democrats would rise up and send the clerics and their
Revolutionary Guards packing.
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- Two Washington-based representatives of a global
Fortune 100 company told their visiting senior executive this week a bombing
campaign of Iran 's nuclear facilities "is inevitable before President
Bush leaves the White House." The incredulous executive thought his
Washington eyes and ears were overstating the case. They assured him they
were deadly serious.
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- Leading neocon Richard Perle, who led the intellectual
charge for the ill-fated invasion of Iraq , believes 2 B-2 bombers, each
with 16 independently targeted weapons systems, could punch out Iran 's
nuclear lights. No Air Force expert we could find agreed. But the Pentagon's
Air Force generals believe it can be done -- and successfully -- with a
much larger operation, including five nights of bombing, some 400 aim points,
75 of them requiring deep penetration ordnance. Time magazine estimates
1,500 such aim points, or "viable targets," related to Iran 's
widely scattered nuclear development complex. The Navy, with its carrier
task forces and ship-launched cruise missiles, does not share the same
degree of certainty.
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- No one has worked more assiduously for military
action against Iran than Michael Ledeen, another leading neocon and the
White House's Karl Rove's favorite, who writes frequently about the "horrors"
of Iran 's mullahocracy. His National Review Online commentary Nov. 1 was
headlined "Delay." Ledeen has grown impatient over Bush's dangerous
postponement of what he considers inevitable. "If the President knows
Iran is waging war on us," wrote Ledeen, "he is obliged to respond;
the only appropriate question is about the method, not the substance. If
he does not know, then he should remove those officials who were obliged
to tell him, and get some people who will tell the truth."
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- The truth has become an increasingly rare commodity
in Washington . Ledeen concludes the president knows the truth, but thinks
he may lack the political capital to directly challenge the mullahs. More
likely, Bush's thinking has changed when confronted by the intelligence
community's assessment of Iran 's retaliatory capabilities. They are described
as "formidable." These include mining the Strait of Hormuz, the
channel for two fifths of the world's oil traffic, which would send oil
prices skyrocketing to $200 almost overnight.
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- Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia 's ambassador
to the U.S. , who headed his country's intelligence service for 25 years,
warns that an attack against Iran would turn "the whole Persian Gulf
into an inferno of exploding fuel tanks and shot-up facilities." In
the past week, Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards test-fired dozens of missiles,
including the long-range Shahab-3 (1,242 miles), Shahab-2 (cluster warhead
of 1,400 bomblets), solid-fuel Zalzals, Zolfaghar73, Z-3, and SCUD-Bs,
all timed to follow by two days the completion of U.S.-led allied naval
maneuvers in the Gulf that Tehran described as "adventurist."
Warships from Australia , Britain , France , Italy , Bahrain and the U.S.
participated.
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- Dubbed "Great Prophet 2," Iran 's 10-day
war games were designed "to show our deterrent and defensive power
to trans-regional enemies, and we hope they will understand the message,"
said Revolutionary Guard commander Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi.
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- Iran also has control over Hezbollah whose terrorist
arm has already reached all the way to Argentina (in the mid-1990s) and
whose sleeper cells, from Saudi Arabia 's eastern oil fields where Shiites
are the majority, to North America , are still feigning sleep.
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- Russia and China have made clear they will not
be part of any tough sanction regime against Iran . They both have strong
commercial ties to Iran . Tehran is paying Russia $700 million for 29 air
defense missile systems. China signed a 10-year, $100 billion oil deal
with Iran.
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- What the neocons dismiss as "nervous nellies"
remind their detractors that conservative historian Paul Johnson
once said, "Statesmen should never plunge into the future...without
first examining what guidance the past could supply?"
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- Ledeen, who acts as spokesman for Iran 's suppressed
democratic forces, says, "The first step is to embrace the unpleasant
fact that we are at war with Iran , and it is long past time to respond."
The Iraqi debacle, coupled with the fading images of Enduring Freedom in
Afghanistan , of the U.S. as the world's sole superpower, of Israel as
the regional superpower, may still persuade President Bush to go for broke
against Iran .
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- In gambling parlance, it's called doubling up,
or the Martingale system. It offers a high probability of small returns
in exchange for a small possibility of becoming homeless - or in this case
friendless.
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