Not Likely

Submitted by LDC (United States), Jul 10, 2007 at 13:54

Daniel Pipes is among the West's most important voices for this era. Nevertheless, I suspect there is no substantive Iranian opposition to "unleash." It's boiling down to this for me:

I was in the Mekong Delta the day all medivac missions (unarmed helicopters that come to carry a wounded soldier or even a sick/wounded civilian to medical aid) were turned over to the ARVN (S. Vietnamese) Aviation units. A few US copters stayed to service John Paul Vann and us few Americans left in IV Corps.

The Ft Wolters-trained ARVN's pilots wouldn't fly at night, nor would they fly into a hostile situation. We found one bird sitting abandoned in a field while the crew went into town for lunch! Medivacs for Vietnamese essentially ceased from that day. Today, they don't have a free country, in large part, because they wouldn't fight for one, and had no notion of what they were fighting for in the first place. And then we hung them out to dry.

It's not going to end any differently in Iraq. We lack the political will for anything else, and there will, again, be much blood on our hands. Iranian opposition? Pipe dream.

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