All eyes on Gen. Peter Pace?

Came across an interesting piece by Gwynne Dyer, a London-based columnist, and his take on the current situation as regards Iran.

Dyer hits it right on the head when he flatly states that an air campaign will not be enough to take out Iran, and that the bulk of available US ground troops are committed to Iraq and cannot be spared for a campaign against Iran. I might add that by extent that also means the stateside military folks either recovering from, or commited to, an Iraq rotation.

He also notes that in the event of an American air campaign against Iran, Iran would flood Iraq with volunteers and weapons/equipment to fight the ground forces already there.

I'd like to take that one step further and suggest that such an air campaign by the U.S. would result in Iranian regulars crossing the border with impunity, headed toward the nearest American base. (FOB Caldwell, aka Kirkush, my first station in Iraq, is about 12 miles from the Iranian border, and the terrain would allow the Iranians to roll on that base with a quickness).

Enter Gen. Peter Pace, the Chairman of the JCS - the man who is finally reporting to his superiors exactly what the I've been saying all along - that the military is at the breaking point, if not flat-out broken. Seems his days of being the SecDef's lapdog ended when Rumsfeld left.

Dyer postulates that Pace, who on Tuesday categorically denied plans to attack Iran (contrary to Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article), may be faced with one hell of a choice if Bush & Company choose to attack Iran: Either follow orders or turn in his stars. Dyer correctly assesses that such a conundrum on the part of Pace may be the biggest military-civilian conflict since Mac Arthur v. Truman, and the situation certainly bears watching as America is seemingly headed toward armed confrontation with Iran.

If the order comes down, can Pace make the right call? This may be something worth watching over the next weeks and months.

Bottom line: 1) Air war will not win overall campaign in Iran. 2) American military is woefully overstretched and not capable of committing to any new war, whether it be in Iran or Fiji. 3) The American people will not support an escalation of the Iraq fiasco into Iran. 4) The resurgence of al-Qaida and Taliban in the Afghan/Pakistan region is a direct result of America's blunder in Iraq.

We'll delve into the al-Qaida issue at another time, exploring all of the Iran/Afghan/Pakistan dynamic in the current series of wars. I think the sun's about to set on relations between the U.S. and Pakistan. That, friends and neighbors, would be bad.