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WORLD / Middle East

Pentagon 'three-day blitz' plan for Iran

(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-09-03 09:11

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.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gestures as he speaks during a
press conference in Tehran August 28, 2007. Ahmadinejad has dismissed the
chance of any US attack on Iran over its nuclear drive. [AFP]

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. “They’re
about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a
conservative foreign policy journal. He?said 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.

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