Middle East

In a blog posted to this site on April 27, 2008 ( scroll down about 5 pages and read it), I referenced a man called Avner Mandelman. Mr. Mandelman often writes in the Canadian national newspaper The Globe and Mail. In late April he was cautioning about the severe impact even marginally higher interest rates could have on the murky world of derivatives and credit swaps.

Now he is warning about the rapidly escalating situation in Iran. And sure enough, when I did a Google search on "mass graves Tehran" I found a story in the Asia Times online edition. Here is a snippet from that article…

This past weekend, a senior Iranian general, Mir-Faisal Bagherzadeh, said his country was digging 320,000 graves for American soldiers scheduled to fight in Iran. "In implementation of the Geneva Conventions, the necessary measures are being taken to provide for the burial of enemy soldiers. We have plans to dig 15,000 to 20,000 graves for each of the border provinces, or a total of 320,000," he said, pointing out that some of them would be mass graves, if necessary. This was "to reduce the suffering of the families of the fallen in any attack against, and prevent the repetition of the long and bitter experience of the Vietnam War".

These may sound like big words - similar to those barked by Saddam Hussein and his information minister Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf in 2003 - but they carry real impact on the psychology of American troops. Iraq - with its weak army and corrupted regime - was impossible to chew for the Americans. Nobody can imagine how difficult a war would be against 65 million Iranians, with a well-trained, well-armed military indoctrinated with Shi'ite Islam and a strong sense of purpose against the "great Satan". Read more »