In the best of all possible worlds, CentCom commander Adm Fallon will prevent W/Cheney from launching 'pre-emptive' strike against Iraq. From Think Progress today:
Fallon: U.S. strike on Iran ‘not being prepared.’Admiral William Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command, said a strike against Iran is “not in the offing.” Fallon added that the rhetoric of right-wing war hawks is unhelpful:
“None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go,” he said.
“Getting Iranian behaviour to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.”
November 11, 2007 8:33 pm
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/11/11/fallon-us-strike-on-iran-not-being-prepared/
Jordan Klepper Crashes The Trump Trial
2 hours ago
Dear . . . Al
ReplyDeleteIt's CENTCOM, by the way. I have a little back story about "Fox" Fallon.
I was deployed to Riyadh, KSA in August (?) 1992 because my organization, CENTAF was preparing for a possible air attack in Iraq. My occupation was target intelligence officer (occupation no longer exists) that morphed into recce targets when it became apparent that we weren't going to bomb anything.
At some point it was decided to call us JTF-SWA: Joint Task Force Southwest Asia. The vice chairman of the JCS (ADM Jeremiah) visited us and noticed that Intel was called IN, Ops was called DO, Logistics was called LG, etc. and that everyone wore an air force uniform. So he decided that the J in JTF meant Joint. Our offices were immediately renamed J-2, J-3, J-4, etc. and suddenly a bunch of navy guys appeared.
One of those guys was an NFO (not a pilot), CAPT "Fox" Fallon, who was to be the Deputy J-3. Now in the USAF, navigators (aka NFOs in the navy) were second class citizens. Our fighter pilots were not happy working for an NFO (naval flight officer). But CAPT Fallon was slick. He definitely had social skills. By the time I escaped to an assignment in Hawaii, our fighter pilots found it impossible to say anything bad about the guy . . . except that he wasn't a fighter pilot.
By the way, how do you know if a guy's a fight pilot? He'll tell you in the first five minutes of conversation.