Iran - Ready to attack

[rossana <rossana at comodinoposta.org>]

American preparations for invading Iran are complete

By Dan Plesch

02/16/07 "New Statesman" -- - American military operations for a major 
conventional war with Iran could be implemented any day. They extend far 
beyond targeting suspect WMD facilities and will enable President Bush 
to destroy Iran's military, political and economic infrastructure 
overnight using conventional weapons.

British military sources told the New Statesman, on condition of 
anonymity, that "the US military switched its whole focus to Iran" as 
soon as Saddam Hussein was kicked out of Baghdad. It continued this 
strategy, even though it had American infantry bogged down in fighting 
the insurgency in Iraq.

The US army, navy, air force and marines have all prepared battle plans 
and spent four years building bases and training for "Operation Iranian 
Freedom". Admiral Fallon, the new head of US Central Command, has 
inherited computerised plans under the name TIRANNT (Theatre Iran Near 
Term).

The Bush administration has made much of sending a second aircraft 
carrier to the Gulf. But it is a tiny part of the preparations. Post 
9/11, the US navy can put six carriers into battle at a month's notice. 
Two carriers in the region, the USS John C Stennis and the USS Dwight D 
Eisenhower, could quickly be joined by three more now at sea: USS Ronald 
Reagan, USS Harry S Truman and USS Theodore Roosevelt, as well as by USS 
Nimitz. Each carrier force includes hundreds of cruise missiles.

Then there are the marines, who are not tied down fighting in Iraq. 
Several marine forces are assembling, each with its own aircraft 
carrier. These carrier forces can each conduct a version of the D-Day 
landings. They come with landing craft, tanks, jump-jets, thousands of 
troops and, yes, hundreds more cruise missiles. Their task is to destroy 
Iranian forces able to attack oil tankers and to secure oilfields and 
installations. They have trained for this mission since the Iranian 
revolution of 1979.

Today, marines have the USS Boxer and USS Bataan carrier forces in the 
Gulf and probably also the USS Kearsarge and USS Bonhomme Richard. Three 
others, the USS Peleliu, USS Wasp and USS Iwo Jima, are ready to join 
them. Earlier this year, HQ staff to manage these forces were moved from 
Virginia to Bahrain.

Vice-President Dick Cheney has had something of a love affair with the 
US marines, and this may reach its culmination in the fishing villages 
along Iran's Gulf coast. Marine generals hold the top jobs at Nato, in 
the Pentagon and are in charge of all nuclear weapons. No marine has 
held any of these posts before.

Traditionally, the top nuclear job went either to a commander of the 
navy's Trident submarines or of the air force's bombers and missiles. 
Today, all these forces follow the orders of a marine, General James 
Cartwright, and are integrated into a "Global Strike" plan which places 
strategic forces on permanent 12-hour readiness.

The only public discussion of this plan has been by the American 
analysts Bill Arkin and Hans Kristensen, who have focused on the 
possible use of atomic weapons. These concerns are justified, but ignore 
how forces can be used in conventional war.

Any US general planning to attack Iran can now assume that at least 
10,000 targets can be hit in a single raid, with warplanes flying from 
the US or Diego Garcia. In the past year, unlimited funding for military 
technology has taken "smart bombs" to a new level.

New "bunker-busting" conventional bombs weigh only 250lb. According to 
Boeing, the GBU-39 small-diameter bomb "quadruples" the firepower of US 
warplanes, compared to those in use even as recently as 2003. A single 
stealth or B-52 bomber can now attack between 150 and 300 individual 
points to within a metre of accuracy using the global positioning system.

With little military effort, the US air force can hit the last-known 
position of Iranian military units, political leaders and supposed sites 
of weapons of mass destruction. One can be sure that, if war comes, 
George Bush will not want to stand accused of using too little force and 
allowing Iran to fight back.

"Global Strike" means that, without any obvious signal, what was done to 
Serbia and Lebanon can be done overnight to the whole of Iran. We, and 
probably the Iranians, would not know about it until after the bombs 
fell. Forces that hide will suffer the fate of Saddam's armies, once 
their positions are known.

The whole of Iran is now less than an hour's flying time from some 
American base or carrier. Sources in the region as well as trade 
journals confirm that the US has built three bases in Azerbaijan that 
could be transit points for troops and with facilities equal to its best 
in Europe.

Most of the Iranian army is positioned along the border with Iraq, 
facing US army missiles that can reach 150km over the border. But it is 
in the flat, sandy oilfields east and south of Basra where the 
temptation will be to launch a tank attack and hope that a disaffected 
population will be grateful.

The regime in Tehran has already complained of US- and UK-inspired 
terror attacks in several Iranian regions where the population opposes 
the ayatollahs' fanatical policies. Such reports corroborate the 
American journalist Seymour Hersh's claim that the US military is 
already engaged in a low-level war with Iran. The fighting is most 
intense in the Kurdish north where Iran has been firing artillery into 
Iraq. The US and Iran are already engaged in a low-level proxy war 
across the Iran-Iraq border.

And, once again, the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute have 
a plan for a peaceful settlement: this time it is for a federal Iran. 
Officially, Michael Ledeen, the AEI plan's sponsor, has been ostracised 
by the White House. However, two years ago, the Congress of Iranian 
Nationalities for a Federal Iran had its inaugural meeting in London.

We should not underestimate the Bush administration's ability to 
convince itself that an "Iran of the regions" will emerge from a 
post-rubble Iran.

Dan Plesch is a research associate at the School of Oriental and African 
Studies

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