USA draws up plans to nuke Iran in event of 9-11 style attack; not contigent on Iran's involvement (sez /American Conservative/ mag)

Tancredo from Colorado. His attempt to win the hearts & minds of the world's muslims seems a little half-hearted.

2) US invades iraq

3) entirely predictable conservative backlash erupts in iran

4) iran announces millions in aid, reconstruction and trade ties with elected shiite iraqi leadership that the US bitterly and illegally opposed

5) ?

Anybody named Tancred is not likely to win over the hearts of Muslims.

Tancred was a grandson of Robert Guiscard and nephew of Bohemund of Taranto. In 1096 he joined his uncle on the First Crusade, and the two made their way to Constantinople. There, he was pressured to swear an oath to Byzantine emperor Alexius I, promising to give back any conquered land to the Empire. Although the other leaders did not intend to keep their oaths, Tancred refused to swear the oath altogether.

He led the siege of Nicaea in 1097, but the city was taken by Alexius' army after secret negotiations with the Seljuk Turks. Because of this Tancred was very distrustful of the Byzantines. Later in 1097 he captured Tarsus and other cities in Cilicia and assisted in the siege of Antioch in 1098.

In 1099 he led the assault on Jerusalem and, along with Gaston IV of Béarn, was the first Crusader to enter the city on July 15. He and Gaston took hundreds of Muslim prisoners, leading them to safety on the roof of the Temple, but despite his protection they were slaughtered along with the rest of the Muslim population. When the Kingdom of Jerusalem was established, Tancred became Prince of Galilee.

In 1100 Tancred became regent of Antioch when Bohemund was taken prisoner by the Seljuks. He expanded the territory of the Principality by capturing land from the Byzantines, although over the next decade Alexius attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring him under Byzantine control. In 1104 he also took control of the County of Edessa when Baldwin I was taken captive after the Battle of Harran. After Baldwin's release in 1107 he had to fight Tancred to regain control of the county; Tancred was eventually defeated and returned to Antioch. In 1108 he refused to honour the Treaty of Devol, in which Bohemund swore an oath of fealty to Alexius and for decades afterwards Antioch remained independent of the Byzantine Empire. In 1110 he brought Krak des Chevaliers under his control, which would later become an important castle in the County of Tripoli. Tancred remained regent in Antioch in the name of Bohemund II until his death in 1112.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tancred%2C_Prince_of_Galilee"

y'know, all this terrorism/the coming armageddon talk has made me go back to a lot 80s video stuff I have. It's great to hear people from back then say things like "Kids today are growing up differently than we did. we didn't have to worry about nucular war [sic] or being here one day and burned up or blown up the next", etc. We have been living under the spectre of complete and total armageddon for almost 60 years. Aside from a brief, naive blip in the 90s, this is now the psychology of the human race... where before the concept of world destruction was relegated to a sort of mystical/mythical far-off event(for which the only experience available for comparison was each person's personal fears of death and destruction), now the possibility for global cataclysm is being seared into the minds of everyone. you'd think it would make us, as a species, behave a little better, or more sensibly. but, y'know, people are stupid.... oh, Cheney, if only we all had "undisclosed locations" from which we could safely and securely dine on the entrails of innocents...

megadeaths!

NO FIGHTING IN THE WAR ROOM!

x-post

-- Alan Conceicao (deadandrestles...), July 22nd, 2005.

OTM. my dad was in the Army for 22 years, and has always had stories about how through his work he got to observe a lot of these kinds of contingency plans being laid out or the preperations and training excercises intended to go with them.

of course he can't really divulge half the things he was involved in, but the gist has always been that the gov't has contingecy plans for practically every scenario involving nuclear weapons.

of course that doesn't make the possibiliy of these plans being utilized any less scarier, and i certainly wouldn't put it past a creep like cheney (or bush or whoever) to 'push the button' if some crisis arose.

But if this is true, then we should already have a plan with no need for the executive branch to order one.

i notice uzbekistan is now gravitating away from america and towards russia, re: oil development plans?

wouldn't a 2nd 9/11 type event be necessary for this iran plan?

it would have to be this kind of attack, as the military has run out of soldiers? conscription would need another cataclysmic event?

who is fitzgerald?