Sarah Baxter, Washington | TimesOnline
September 2, 2007
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. “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 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.
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