we're good at that kinda stuff

there didnt used to be a nation called "Panama"

after we dug the panama canal (took it over from the French who failed at it) in Columbia

we (the US) hired a bunch of thugs to foment a revolution and declare independence from Columbia

the Columbian Army came north on a set of trains to put down the revolution. They were met at the train station by an American with a briefcase full of money and the Columbian army stayed on the train and continued on north

and the nation of Panama was born

I got a different take on the interview. I don't think she ever recommended a war on Iran. Speaking purely in the hypothetical, she said (paraphrased); If Obama started a war with Iran, It would help him with some voters... which is true. Even in this, she was referring to hypotheticals posed by Pat Buchanan.

I never got anything from the interview that sounded like "I think we should go to war with Iran." The conversation was about things Obama could do to win votes.

I think most US politicians would be very hesitant to go to war now with the national debt what it is.

lets hope so, and ur scenario about Palins statement seems reasonable. It was most likely strictly a hypothetical one. Its so easy to misread the meaning of a quote because it often leaves out the context and tone of the conversation which it was part of.(look at the recent fiasco with John Meyer)

I dunno

war seems to be good for business

WW2 brought us out of the depression and put everyone to work

During Viet Nam in the 60's America was very affluent

Clinton gave us Kosovo and Bosnia and a budget surplus

I guess Haliburton gets good business off of war as well.

mmmmmm that would be the subsidiary of Brown and Root. who used to be the main construction firm in the US for building power plants and gas plants

then Halliburton bought them out and merged them with Kellog (KBR). KBR is the largest (non union) construction employer in the US.

in 2007 Halliburton split off from KBR and cut them loose as their own company

Halliburton itself is a well service company. they are the main people in the US doing well cementing and fracking (BJ Hughes is a close second) as of 2009 Halliburton had 52,000 employees

so we can slam Halliburton if we want but 52,000 people depend on it for their livelihoods

That was a different era. We were the only major country that wasn't ravaged by WWII. We were left to make all the cars, appliances, and other goods the US and the World wanted without competition. Today that role is being filled by China.

A proper comparison to "War vs the US economy" would be Iraq and Afghanistan. Look what it has done.

Another major factor is the energy cost associated with war in the middle east. We paid as much as $150 a barrel for oil that we are now buying at the national cost of over $700 billion per year. A war with Iran would make oil skyrocket again which would bring out the fact that China has quietly purchased much of the world's oil supply.

I want a job building Predators

that is the future of warfare and will prolly be a booming business once we attack Iran (and or Mexico)

Here is the article Pat Buchanan wrote.. Nowhere in this article does Pat Buchanan say we should attack Iran. He was one of the biggest critics of the War In Iraq. And he does not support a war with Iran.. He makes the case that the action taken by the senate will force obama's hand..

Republicans already counting the seats they will pick up this fall should keep in mind Obama has a big card yet to play.

Should the president declare he has gone the last mile for a negotiated end to Iran’s nuclear program and impose the “crippling” sanctions he promised in 2008, America would be on an escalator to confrontation that could lead straight to war.

And should war come, that would be the end of GOP dreams of adding three-dozen seats in the House and half a dozen in the Senate.

http://buchanan.org/blog/will-obama-play-the-war-card-3567
Harry Reid is surely aware a U.S. clash with Iran, with him at the president’s side, could assure his re-election. Last week, Reid whistled through the Senate, by voice vote, a bill to put us on that escalator.

Senate bill 2799 would punish any company exporting gasoline to Iran. Though swimming in oil, Iran has a limited refining capacity and must import 40 percent of the gas to operate its cars and trucks and heat its homes.

And cutting off a country’s oil or gas is a proven path to war.

In 1941, the United States froze Japan’s assets, denying her the funds to pay for the U.S. oil on which she relied, forcing Tokyo either to retreat from her empire or seize the only oil in reach, in the Dutch East Indies.

The only force able to interfere with a Japanese drive into the East Indies? The U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Egypt’s Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1967 threatened to close the Straits of Tiran between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba to ships going to the Israeli port of Elath. That would have cut off 95 percent of Israel’s oil.

Israel response: a pre-emptive war that destroyed Egypt’s air force and put Israeli troops at Sharm el-Sheikh on the Straits of Tiran.

Were Reid and colleagues seeking to strengthen Obama’s negotiating hand?

The opposite is true. The Senate is trying to force Obama’s hand, box him in, restrict his freedom of action, by making him impose sanctions that would cut off the negotiating track and put us on a track to war — a war to deny Iran weapons that the U.S. Intelligence community said in December 2007 Iran gave up trying to acquire in 2003.

Sound familiar?

Republican leader Mitch McConnell has made clear the Senate is seizing control of the Iran portfolio. “If the Obama administration will not take action against this regime, then Congress must.”

U.S. interests would seem to dictate supporting those elements in Iran who wish to be rid of the regime and re-engage the West. But if that is our goal, the Senate bill, and a House version that passed 412 to 12, seem almost diabolically perverse.

For a cutoff in gas would hammer Iran’s middle class. The Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia on their motorbikes would get all they need. Thus the leaders of the Green Movement who have stood up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah oppose sanctions that inflict suffering on their own people.

Cutting off gas to Iran would cause many deaths. And the families of the sick, the old, the weak, the women and the children who die are unlikely to feel gratitude toward those who killed them.

And despite the hysteria about Iran’s imminent testing of a bomb, the U.S. intelligence community still has not changed its finding that Tehran is not seeking a bomb.

The low-enriched uranium at Natanz, enough for one test, has neither been moved nor enriched to weapons grade. Ahmadinejad this week offered to take the West’s deal and trade it for fuel for its reactor. Iran’s known nuclear facilities are under U.N. watch. The number of centrifuges operating at Natanz has fallen below 4,000. There is speculation they are breaking down or have been sabotaged.

And if Iran is hell-bent on a bomb, why has Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair not revised the 2007 finding and given us the hard evidence?

U.S. anti-missile ships are moving into the Gulf. Anti-missile batteries are being deployed on the Arab shore. Yet, Gen. David Petraeus warned yesterday that a strike on Iran could stir nationalist sentiment behind the regime.

Nevertheless, the war drums have again begun to beat.

Daniel Pipes in a National Review Online piece featured by the Jerusalem Post — “How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran” — urges Obama to make a “dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue” by ordering the U.S. military to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Citing six polls, Pipes says Americans support an attack today and will “presumably rally around the flag” when the bombs fall.

Will Obama cynically yield to temptation, play the war card and make “conservatives swoon,” in Pipes’ phrase, to save himself and his party? We shall see.

here is another article written By Buchanan in June 2009


Outlasting the Ayatollahs

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The Obama policy of extending an open hand to Iran is working and ought not be abandoned because of the grim events in Tehran.

For the Iranian theocracy has just administered a body blow to its legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people and the world.

Before Saturday, the regime could credibly posture as defender of the nation, defiant in the face of the threats from Israel, faithful to the cause of the Palestinians, standing firm for Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear power.

Today, the regime, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is under a cloud of suspicion that they are but another gang of corrupt politicians who brazenly stole a presidential election to keep themselves and their clerical cronies in power.

What should we do now? Wait for the dust to settle.

No U.S. denunciation of what took place in Iran is as credible as the reports and pictures coming out of Iran. Those reports, those pictures are stripping the mullahs of the only asset they seemed to possess — that, even if fanatics, they were principled, honest men.

Like Hamas, it was said of them that at least they were not corrupt, that at least they did not cheat the people.

No more. Today, in the streets of Tehran and other cities, they call to mind “Comrade Bob” Mugabe in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will never recapture that revolutionary purity he once seemed to possess as the man of the people who was elected president in the upset of 2005. Today, he appears, as The New York Times puts it, “as the shrewd and ruthless front man for a clerical military and political elite that is more unified and emboldened than at any time since the 1979 revolution.”

There are other reasons Obama should not heed the war hawks howling for confrontation now.

When your adversary is making a fool of himself, get out of the way. That is a rule of politics Lyndon Johnson once put into the most pungent of terms. U.S. fulminations will change nothing in Tehran. But they would enable the regime to divert attention to U.S. meddling in Iran’s affairs and portray the candidate robbed in this election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, as a poodle of the Americans.

When Nikita Khrushchev bathed the Hungarian revolution in blood, Ike did not break relations. Khrushchev was at Camp David three years later.
When Deng Xiaoping and Co. ordered the tanks into Tiananmen Square, George Bush I did not break relations. When Moscow ordered Warsaw to crush Solidarity, Ronald Reagan did not let that act of repression deter him from seeking direct talks to reduce nuclear weapons.

Again, let us wait for the dust to settle.

By now, even Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei must recognize that the Iranian revolution is losing the Iranian people. This is the third of four straight presidential elections where the turnout has been huge and the candidate who promised reconciliation with the West and an easing of social strictures won a landslide among the student young. Those are the future leaders of Iran.

Which way the regime will now go is difficult to predict.

After Tienanmen Square, the Chinese rulers who ordered in the tanks sought to reconnect with the disillusioned young by opening up to the West and building a neo-capitalist economy.

Iran, in economic straits with U.S. sanctions biting, its oil and gas reserves dwindling, could try the same route. Seize the opposition’s best issues by seeking accommodation with America.

More likely, the regime, backed by the hard-line military, will try to reconnect with the masses and regain its reputation as defender of Islam and the nation, by defying the Americans, denouncing Israel and pressing forward with Iran’s nuclear program.

The dilemma for America is that the theocracy defines itself and grounds its claim to leadership through its unyielding resistance to the Great Satan — the United States — and to Israel.

Nevertheless, Obama, with his outstretched hand, his message to Iran on its national day, his admission that the United States had a hand in the 1953 coup in Tehran, his assurances that we recognize Iran’s right to nuclear power, succeeded. He stripped the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad of their clinching argument — that America is out to destroy Iran and they are indispensable to Iran’s defense.

With the mask of patriotism and the legacy of true revolution lost through this election fraud, Iran’s regime stands exposed as just another dictatorship covering up a refusal to yield power and privilege with a pack of lies about protecting the nation.

Saturday’s election not only revealed the character of the Iranian regime. It also revealed that time is on our side. If the people of Iran can defy this regime, it is no threat to us.

As with the other revolutionary and totalitarian regimes, from the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, to the People’s Republic of Mao, to the revolutionary Cuba of Fidel, America outlasts them all.

And the ayatollahs, too.

http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-outlasting-the-ayatollahs-1572

Did he get it from god?

Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson aren't the same person in case you are interested..

Joe, you are correct. The little snippet there was talking about Obama being re-elected. She said "Say he played the war card" she kept saying IF

Wallace even asked her of she was suggesting if he would cynically play the war card and she answered she was not suggesting that.

It was all hypothetical and regarding Obama's election in 2012.

here is the transcript



http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,585042,00.html

So she said she would like him to show more support for Israel! That would be nice.

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/81997/

Yeah, I realized that later on that I was thinking of Pat Robertson.

Forget Iran, we should declare war on France.

mmmmmmmmm well they are pretty close

i hate to say it but either one doesn't compare to the racist Van Impe. That man along with his blonde cohort belong in a mental ward