Saturday, September 01, 2007

Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran

Timesonline:THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert....

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.
President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

One Washington source said the “temperature was rising” inside the administration. Bush was “sending a message to a number of audiences”, he said ? to the Iranians and to members of the United Nations security council who are trying to weaken a tough third resolution on sanctions against Iran for flouting a UN ban on uranium enrichment.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last week reported “significant” cooperation with Iran over its nuclear programme and said that uranium enrichment had slowed. Tehran has promised to answer most questions from the agency by November, but Washington fears it is stalling to prevent further sanctions. Iran continues to maintain it is merely developing civilian nuclear power.

Bush is committed for now to the diplomatic route but thinks Iran is moving towards acquiring a nuclear weapon. According to one well placed source, Washington believes it would be prudent to use rapid, overwhelming force, should military action become necessary.
Israel, which has warned it will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, has made its own preparations for airstrikes and is said to be ready to attack if the Americans back down.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which uncovered the existence of Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, said the IAEA was being strung along. “A number of nuclear sites have not even been visited by the IAEA,” he said. “They’re giving a clean bill of health to a regime that is known to have practised deception.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, irritated the Bush administration last week by vowing to fill a “power vacuum” in Iraq. But Washington believes Iran is already fighting a proxy war with the Americans in Iraq.

The Institute for the Study of War last week released a report by Kimberly Kagan that explicitly uses the term “proxy war” and claims that with the Sunni insurgency and Al-Qaeda in Iraq “increasingly under control”, Iranian intervention is the “next major problem the coalition must tackle”.

Bush noted that the number of attacks on US bases and troops by Iranian-supplied munitions had increased in recent months ? “despite pledges by Iran to help stabilise the security situation in Iraq”.

It explains, in part, his lack of faith in diplomacy with the Iranians. But Debat believes the Pentagon’s plans for military action involve the use of so much force that they are unlikely to be used and would seriously stretch resources in Afghanistan and Iraq.

5 comments:

saggezard said...

It's about time, I look forward to it, but who is going to run the government afterwards. Is there going to be a referendum, I wish we could bring Reza Shah back to life, the kind of mess the Ayatollahs created will take a super human/organizational being to fix.
I just hope they are not going to leave any remnant of the current regime to have any part of running our country. I am still skeptical about rhetoric, I will believe it when the action is made. Have heard the news so many times.

blank said...

The Islamic Revolutionary Maifi will exist after any bombing campaign unless the Iranian people themselves take action to insure the revolutionary maifi can never sink in fangs into the the nation and re-infect the nation with its toxin.

There are many unknowns in such a bombing campaign. The best models and projections can not predict correctly the outcome. The most disturbing thing is that Bush Administration predictions on Iraq were so very wrong.

Frieda said...

I don't believe this a bit... Why would they leak the info if they were going to bomb them?
I think it's a misinformation / psychological war for now!

Bloviating Zeppelin said...

And Ahmadinnerjacket says this ISN'T going to happen because, after all, he's an engineer and he's done all the "tabulations."

Yeah. Right.

BZ

SERENDIP said...

BV: I don't know if you heard that Rafsanjani was just elected as the speaker of Assembly of Experts who is in charge of electing and supervising the Supreme Leader.

Rafsanjani is seen by the “useful idiots” and the “realist” camp in the U.S. as the “moderate” mullah(btw, he is a wanted man by Argentina). This appointment will resurrect the leftist argument for more diplomacy and a possibility of a “Grand Bargain”.

This is another ploy by the cunning mullahs to deceive the left and buy more time to build their nukes. We should not fall for this trap.